THE 
UNREST   OF    WOMEN 


BY 

Edward  Sandford  Martin 

Author  of 

'The  Luxury  of  Children,"  "Windfalls  of  Observation," 

"The  Reflections  of  a  Beginning  Husband,"  etc. 


New  York  and  London 
D.  Appleton  and  Company 

•^-  45531 

^5  2  0      9 


Copyright,  1913,  bt 
D.  APPLETON  AND  COMPANY 

Copyright,  1912-1913,  by  the  CcBTia  Pdblishinq  Co. 
Copyright,  1913,  by  the  Life  Publishing  Co. 


Printed  in  the  United  States  of  America 


V4q> 
CONTENTS 

PAGE 

)             I.     The  Feminine  Unrest      ...  3 
^           II.     The  Disquiet  of  Miss  Thomas   .  25 
III.     The    Agitation    of    Mrs.    Bel- 
mont    47 

IV.     The  Admirable  Miss  Addams     .  69 
V.     Self-supporting  Wives     ...  93 
VI.     Feminism  and  the  Dual  Stand- 
ard        115 

VII.     The  Cause  and  the  Cure      .     .  127 


I 

THE    FEMININE    UNREST 


THE  FEMININE   UNREST 

THERE  is  a  great  deal  in 
print  about  "the  feminine  un- 
rest." Whether  it  is  much 
more  prevalent  than  usual,  or  only- 
more  vocal,  it  presses  on  attention 
and  has  to  be  considered.  Parents 
of  girls  want  to  know  their  duty; 
want  to  know  to  what  sort  of  em- 
ployments and  responsibilities  they 
must  bring  their  daughters  up. 
Girls  still  in  school  or  lately  out 
grope  to  discover  what  is  expected 
of  them.  Are  they  to  be  helpers  at 
home  or  workers  independent  of 
their  families?  Are  they  to  be  do- 
[3] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

mestie  or  extraparietal  ?  Are  they 
to  find  an  outside  job  for  the  sak^ 
of  their  own  development,  or  only 
seek  one  if  they  need  the  wage  it  wilL 
bring  them  ?  Shall  they  go  to  college 
if  they  can,  and  if  not  what  shall! 
they  do  next  ?  Shall  thej^  marry,  and 
if  so  whom,  and  on  what  terms? 
What  is  the  life  to  which  they  are  to 
adjust  themselves?  Is  it  the  life  of 
women  in  the  Nineteenth  Century,- 
or  a  new  and  different  life,  calling 
for  new  plans  and  proceedings? 

These  are  real  questions.  All  the 
girls  nowadays  are  more  or  less  con- 
fronted by  them.  Most  of  them  seem 
to  feel  more  or  less  uncertain  about 
their  destiny;  uncertain  not  as  to 
particulars,  but  as  to  generals;  un- 
certain not  as  to  which  man  and  when 
and  where,  but  whether  they  must 

[4] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

try  to  be  such  women  as  their  moth- 
ers were,  or  shape  themselves  by- 
some  new  pattern  the  outHnes  of 
which  are  not  yet  clear.  So  it  seems 
rather  a  hard  time  for  girls;  but  the 
trouble  is  hardly  a  trouble  at  all,  for 
what  chiefly  makes  the  disturbance 
is  enlargement  of  opportunity.  Girls 
have  a  wider  choice  than  they  used 
to  have.  Besides  the  old-time  call- 
ings of  dressmaking,  millinery,  teach- 
ing school  and  getting  married,  they 
can — let's  see,  let's  see — work  in  fac- 
tories, laundries,  stores;  be  cashiers; 
be  stenographers  or  typewriters;  be 
trained  nurses  or  doctors;  be  tele- 
phone girls,  indispensable  office 
workers,  actresses,  writers,  librarians, 
social  workers,  deans  and  presidents 
of  colleges;  or  go  into  some  other 
business  not  done  at  home. 
[5] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

Not  many  mothers  of  contempo- 
rary girls  tried  any  of  these  latter 
employments.  The  typewriter  and 
the  telephone  were  only  invented 
yesterday;  trained  nurses  belong  for 
the  most  part  to  the  last  quarter- 
century;  "salesladies"  are  no  older. 
That  makes  these  new  fashions  in 
employments  for  women  the  more 
experimental.  The  wisdom  of 
mothers,  a  body  of  knowledge  de- 
rived from  instinct,  experience  and 
observation,  and  of  enormous  value 
to  human  life,  is  a  good  deal  baffled 
by  them.  Indeed  it  is  current  doc- 
trine that  the  live-at-home  mothers 
are  not  up  to  the  task  of  looking 
after  all  these  outworking  girls,  and 
that  the  law — the  Government — 
must  undertake  it.  That  is  consider- 
ably true.  This  great  force  of  fac- 
[61 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

tory-working,  office-keeping,  mer- 
chandising women  is  a  new  feature  of 
civilization,  and  there  must,  of  course, 
be  proper  laws  for  its  regulation  and 
protection. 

The  girls,  as  they  come  along  and 
see  this  great  body  of  outworking 
women,  say  to  themselves:  "That  is 
what  woman's  life  is  coming  to  be. 
That  is  what  I  must  face  and  pre- 
pare for.  The  old  domestic  life  of 
housekeeping  is  going  the  way  of  the 
distaff.  What  is  important  now  for 
me  is  to  be  qualified  to  hold  a  worth- 
while place  in  this  new  life  that  is  and 
is  to  be." 

That  also  is  considerably  true.  But 
it  is  not  the  whole  truth.  There  is  a 
huge  body  of  women  in  the  away- 
from-home  employments,  but  they 
are  almost  all  helpers.  The  princi- 
[7] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

pals  and  ruling  workers  are  almost 
all  men.  Lawyers'  offices  are  full  of 
women,  extremelj''  competent  and 
useful,  but  there  are  few  woman  law- 
yers; there  are  many  trained  nurses, 
but  comparatively  few  woman  doc- 
tors; there  are  girls  galore  on  the 
floors  of  the  department  stores,  and 
some  women  hold  excellent  positions 
in  them,  but  a  woman  in  the  firm  is  a 
great  rarity.  Women  are  admirable 
helpers  in  business,  cheaper  than 
men,  more  tractable,  often  more 
agreeable,  but  thej^  do  not  stand  on 
the  same  level  with  men  in  these  un- 
domestic  employments. 

What  is  the  reason? 

Does  it  mean  that  women  have 
not  yet  got  their  full  dues  in  in- 
dustry? 

It  does  mean  that,  no  doubt,  to 

[8] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

some  extent;  but  that  is  not  the  rea- 
son. 

Does  it  mean  that  women  are  not 
the  equals  of  men? 

No;  it  does  not  mean  that.  They 
are  equal. 

The  reason  is  this :  that  all  this  out- 
of-the-home  work  is  to  man  his  voca- 
tion, but  to  woman  at  large  no  more 
than  her  avocation.  Her  great  vo- 
cation is  motherhood.  It  is  in  that 
that  she  is  indispensable  and  un- 
rivaled ;  and  in  that  is  the  basis  of  her 
complete  equality  with  man.  In  that 
she  is  the  principal,  not  only  in  bear- 
ing children,  but  in  rearing  and  train- 
ing them  as  well.  That  is  by  so  much 
the  most  important  calling  to  which 
women  must  look  forward  that  for 
the  general  run  of  women  all  the 
other  employments  are  of  negligible 

[9] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

moment  in  comparison  with  it  and 
have  to  be  considered  on  a  basis  of 
their  relation  to  it.  To  that  calhng 
the  great  mass  of  women  in  due  time 
find  their  way.  They  marry  and 
have  children.  The  extraparietal 
wage-earning  work  that  some  of 
them  do  before  marriage  may  be  com- 
pared with  the  years  of  military  serv- 
ice which  young  men  have  to  give  in 
France  and  Germany.  It  is  a  tem- 
porary employment,  necessary  and 
often  very  valuable  as  a  training,  but 
in  a  field  of  endeavor  from  which  they 
expect  to  withdraw  as  soon  as  they 
can.  Like  the  young  soldiers  learn- 
ing the  rudiments  of  war  a  large  ma- 
jority of  the  women  wage-earners 
are  young  girls  serving  their  time  in 
the  industrial  army,  but  expecting 
later  to  earn  their  discharge  and  pro- 

[10] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

ceed  to  their  real  business  in  life.  To 
marry  and  have  children  and  raise 
them  is  the  natural  destiny  of  women ; 
the  same  now  that  it  always  was  and 
always  will  be.  It  is  for  that,  primar- 
ily, that  girls  should  be  trained;  to 
that  that  they  should  be  encouraged 
to  look  forward;  and  their  training 
should  be  such  as  will  help  them  to 
marry  wisely,  to  have  children  that  are 
worth  raising,  and  to  raise  them  well.^ 
Then  what  is  the  unrest  all  about? 
For  one  thing  it  is  an  imrest  that 
waits  on  readjustment.  This  great 
intrusion  of  woman,  especially  be- 
tween the  ages  of  seventeen  and 
twenty-seven,  in  the  out-of-the-house 
employments  is  a  new  thing,  and 
a  big  thing  full  of  problems.  In 
hundreds  of  thousands  of  families 
thought  has  to  be  taken  not  only 
3  [11] 


THE    UNREST     OF    WOMEN 

about  the  training  of  daughters  for 
their  ultimate  destiny  of  motherhood, 
and  putting  them  in  the  way  to  real- 
ize it,  but  also  about  their  training 
for  this  intermediate  work  which  is 
for  so  many  of  them  a  necessary  pref- 
ace to  marriage,  and  which  will  de- 
termine a  good  deal,  by  their  experi- 
ence in  it,  what  sort  of  marriages 
they  will  make.  It  is  necessary  in 
such  families  to  plan  for  a  girl's  wage- 
earning  employment  as  though  it 
were  to  be,  as  it  may  be,  her  life's 
work,  and  to  do  it  with  the  knowl- 
edge, as  a  rule,  that  it  ought  not  to 
be  her  life's  work,  and  with  the  ex- 
pectation that  it  won't  be.  That 
makes  a  troublesome  problem,  and 
parents'  minds  and  daughters'  minds, 
in  the  strain  of  solving  it,  are  apt  to 
let  the  immediate  need  cloud  their 
[121 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

vision  of  the  remoter  and  more  im- 
portant destiny.  It  looks  important 
for  a  girl  to  get  a  good  place  where 
she  will  like  her  work  and  do  well, 
but  it  is  much  more  important  that 
the  work  shall  like  her,  and  that  she 
shall  escape  from  it  in  time,  while 
she  is  still  capable  of  fulfilling  wom- 
an's greater  destiny  and  has  not  yet 
become  an  office  fixture. 

Moreover  it  is  an  unrest  that  is  a 
part  of  a  great  unrest  that  is  affect- 
ing all  the  world,  that  puts  the 
Young  Turks  in  charge  of  Turkey, 
starts  a  republic  in  China,  and  gives 
power  to  Asquith  and  Lloyd-George 
in  England,  and  that  put  a  third 
party  into  our  politics  last  summer. 
This  unrest  is  a  general  reaching  out 
for  more:  for  more  liberty,  more  jus- 
tice, more  opportunity,  more  to  eat, 

[13] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

more  money  to  spend,  more  fun,  more 
leisure,  more  knowledge.  In  the 
masses  of  the  people  of  the  earth  there 
moves  a  great  longing  for  a  better 
chance  and  a  fuller  life.  That  is  a 
great  phenomenon,  and,  of  course, 
women  have  their  full  share  of  it. 
The  people  moved  by  this  general 
unrest  don't  know  precisely  what 
they  want  nor  how  to  get  it.  They 
don't  know  at  all  accurately  what  is 
right  and  what  is  wrong  in  the  way 
the  world  is  run  at  present,  nor  what 
resources  are  available  to  satisfy  their 
yearnings,  nor  what  instrumentalities 
of  government  and  justice  are  defec- 
tive or  obsolete,  nor  who,  nor  what, 
is  to  blame  for  distresses  or  wants  or 
restrictions  that  they  chafe  under. 
Every  innovator,  every  mover  for 
new  methods,  every  vaunter  of  a  new 

[14] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

remedy,  finds  his  opportunity  in  this 
prevaihng  temper  of  men.  Listen 
to  Debs,  lately  the  Socialist  candidate 
for  President,  in  his  speech  accepting 
the  nomination: 

"Capitalism  is  rushing  blindly  to 
its  impending  doom.  All  the  signs 
portend  the  inevitable  breakdown  of 
the  existing  order.  Deep-seated  dis- 
content has  seized  upon  the  masses. 
Poverty,  high  prices,  unemployment, 
child  slavery,  widespread  misery  and 
haggard  want  in  a  land  bursting  with 
abundance ;  prostitution  and  insanity, 
suicide  and  crime;  these  in  solemn 
numbers  tell  the  tragic  story  of  capi- 
talism's saturnalia  of  blood  and  tears 
and  shame  as  its  end  draws  near." 

When  that  sort  of  discourse  en- 
gages the  sympathies  of  millions,  of 
course  there  is  unrest  among  women. 

[15] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

There  is  unrest  among  women  be- 
cause there  is  unrest  in  the  air  they 
breathe,  but,  naturally,  it  takes  its 
own  special  forms. 

The  form  that  is  most  conspicuous 
is  the  aspiration  for  the  suffrage.  A 
certain  proportion  of  women — how 
large  no  one  j^et  knows — have 
reached  the  conclusion  that  they  want 
the  vote.  That  seems  to  stand  in 
their  minds  as  the  evidence  of  equal- 
ity with  man.  Give  them  the  vote 
and  they  will  see  to  it  that  women 
are  paid  the  same  wages  as  men  for 
the  same  work,  that  the  factory  laws 
are  what  thc}^  should  be,  that  white 
slavery  is  abolished,  that  child  labor 
is  duly  guarded  and  restricted,  and, 
and,  and,  and.  Not  only  are  the  suf- 
fragists restless  themselves,  but  thej'- 
also  force  disturbance  on  the  women, 

[16] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

apparently  a  large  majority,  who 
have  found  their  vocation  in  life  and 
are  fairty  satisfied  with  it,  or  else  see 
no  cure  in  suffrage  for  what  they 
don't  like,  and  fear  its  drawbacks 
more  than  they  anticipate  its  bene- 
fits. Such  women  find  themselves 
threatened  with  political  obligations 
which  they  think  do  not  belong  to 
them,  and  which  they  do  not  wish  to 
incur,  unless  they  organize  their  op- 
position and  make  it  felt.  And  this 
some  of  them  are  doing,  and  with 
energy,  though  not  with  much  joy 
in  the  combat.  For,  much  as  they 
dislike  the  duty,  it  is  not  one  that  can 
safel}^  be  neglected  by  women  who 
believe  that  political  government  will 
remain  in  the  hands  of  men  anyhow, 
and  that  it  is  better  that  the  respon- 
sibility should  go  with  the  power. 
[171 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

Most  women  still  prefer  that 
it  should  so  remain.  Most  women 
prefer,  other  things  being  equal, 
government  bj'-  men  to  govern- 
ment by  women.  And  that  seems 
a  sound  preference,  for  though 
it  might  seem  natural  that  women 
should  side  Avith  women  against 
men,  and  men  with  men  against 
women,  that  is  not  so  natural  as 
it  seems  and  usually  does  not  hap^ 
pen.  It  is  woman,  not  man,  that  is 
indispensable  to  man,  and  he  is  no- 
toriouslj^  prone  to  take  the  side  of 
a  woman  against  a  man;  and  it  is 
man,  not  woman,  that  is  indispen- 
sable to  woman,  and  at  a  pinch  she 
will  usually  cleave  to  her  own  as 
against  her  like. 

The  suffrage  has  come  in  some 
countries  and  in  some  of  our  own 

[18] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

States.  Let  it  be  tried  in  the  experi- 
ment stations.  We  do  not  do  well 
to  be  too  much  afraid  of  it.  If  it 
belongs  to  come  we  shall  have  it.  If 
it  belongs  to  stay  it  will  stay.  Cali- 
fornia is  trying  it.  Let  us  see 
whether  the  woman  voters  will  con- 
tinue to  like  it  and  to  use  it,  whether 
it  helps  matters,  whether  the  feminine 
unrest  is  allayed  or  increased  by  it. 
Colorado  has  had  it  for  nineteen 
years,  and  its  value  and  the  expe- 
diency of  it  seem  to  be  as  much  dis- 
cussed and  disputed  in  that  State 
as  ever,  and  with  just  as  much  un- 
certainty of  conclusion.  It  does  not 
appear  that  "poverty,  high  prices, 
unemployment,  child  slavery,  wide- 
spread misery  and  haggard  want, 
prostitution,  insanity,  suicide  and 
crime"  are  so  much  scarcer  in  Colo- 

[19] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

rado  than  in  other  States  of  like  eco- 
nomic conditions  as  to  furnish  an 
example  of  the  magical  value  of 
women's  votes.  Women's  votes  seem 
to  be  much  like  men's  votes.  When 
a  row  of  pianos  make  a  concert  then 
the  voters  will  make  a  millennium. 
At  present  it  is  not  the  pianos,  but 
the  players  who  play  on  them,  who 
make  the  concert;  and  it  is  not  the 
voters,  but  the  poets,  prophets  and 
statesmen  who  inspire  and  enlist 
them,  that  secure  millennial  improve- 
ments in  legislation  and  government. 
It  does  not  seem  to  matter  greatly 
who  votes  if  only  all  the  social  groups 
are  fairly  represented.  But  a  pianist 
can  make  no  concert  without  his 
piano,  and  the  political  reformer 
must  have  some  instrument  on  which 
to  play  and  through  which  to  express 

[20] 


THE    FEMININE    UNREST 

himself  and  achieve  his  performances. 
Our  reformers  have  such  an  instru- 
ment as  it  is,  an  instrument  that  not 
only  responds  to  the  player,  but  has, 
too,  the  property  of  the  aeolian  harp, 
in  that  it  catches  what  is  in  the  air 
and  is  harmonious  to  it. 

The  feminine  unrest  stirs  a  certain 
proportion  of  the  women  to  organize 
to  get  the  vote,  and  to  hope  when 
they  have  got  it  to  achieve  great 
things.  Other  women,  stirred  by  the 
same  promptings,  care  nothing  for 
the  vote  and  will  not  organize  to  get 
it.  But  not  a  bit  the  less  they  reach 
out  to  satisfy  the  new  needs  of  which 
they  have  become  conscious,  and  to 
adjust  themselves  to  the  changes  in 
their  world  and  meet  the  new  de- 
mands that  life  makes  of  them. 


II 

THE  DISQUIET  OF  MISS  THOMAS 


II 

THE  DISQUIET  OF  MISS  THOMAS 

NOT  all  the  nice  women  nor  all 
the  wise  ones  are  on  either 
side  of  the  suffrage  question. 
One  sees  ladies  with  a  pathetic  inef- 
fectuality  of  the  wits  campaigning 
and  even  "soap-boxing"  for  the  bal- 
lot, and  conveying  at  every  word  and 
turn  involuntary  evidence  of  their 
own  incapacity  to  do  good  with  it. 
Other  ladies,  hearty  supporters  of 
the  other  side,  disclose  by  their 
speech,  their  aspects,  the  very  way 
they  put  one  foot  before  the  other, 
that  the  life  they  live  and  the  world 

[25] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

they  live  it  in  are  neither  of  them 
quite  real,  and  that  their  view  of 
things  is  a  rear-platform  view  that 
we  are  all  rapidly  speeding  away 
from.  "Equal  suffrage"  is  a  big  is- 
sue and  important,  but  it  is  only  a 
detail  of  the  woman  problem  and  the 
woman  movement.  Given,  it  may 
prove  a  biscuit  thrown  to  a  whale. 
Organized  unrest,  encouraged  by  the 
evidence  that  it  can  get  what  it  tries 
for,  may  be  expected  to  proceed  to 
the  next  thing. 

And  so  it  is  important  to  know 
what  else  besides  suffrage  is  in  the 
minds  of  the  more  important  suf- 
fragists. The  vote,  of  course,  is  only 
a  tool  by  which  women  can  express 
their  political  desires.  Any  notion 
that  we  can  get  of  their  ideals  of  a 
world  improved  by  women  for  women 

[26] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

will  be  helpful  in  clearing  the  issues 
and  giving  individual  judgment  a 
chance  to  be  exercised  on  the  question 
whether  or  not  such  ideals  are  sound. 
President  Thomas,  of  Bryn  Mawr, 
is  a  notable  woman  and  an  ardent 
suffragist.  Perhaps  from  her  ad- 
dress at  the  anniversary  of  the  found- 
ing of  Mount  Holyoke  College,  on 
"Woman's  Part  in  the  Future,"  we 
may  get  an  idea  of  her  notion  of  what 
would  make  the  world  more  accept- 
able to  women. 

Miss  Thomas  says  that  women 
now  have  almost  equal  opportunities 
for  study,  but  have  not  yet  won  the 
rewards  of  studjs  that  they  are  "still 
shut  out  from  the  incentives  to  schol- 
arship." Even  in  the  low^er  public 
schools,  she  saj^s,  the  most  responsible 
and  highly  paid  positions  are  still  re- 

3  [27] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

served  for  men,  and  only  in  a  few 
women's  colleges  may  women  com- 
pete with  men  for  full  professorships. 
Enlarging  upon  that  she  goes  on  to 
say  that  women  scholars  have  another 
and  still  more  cruel  handicap.  "They 
may  have  spent  half  a  lifetime  in  fit- 
ting themselves  for  a  scholar's  work 
and  then  may  be  asked  to  choose  be- 
tween it  and  marriage.  No  one  can 
estimate  the  number  of  women  who 
remain  unmarried  in  revolt  before 
such  a  horrible  alternative." 

"How  many  men  scholars,"  she 
asks,  "would  there  be  if  we  compelled 
them  to  make  such  an  inhuman 
choice?  As  a  result  every  civilized 
country  contains  a  large  and  ever-in- 
creasing body  of  celibate  women  and 
men.  The  best  women,  and  many  of 
the  best  men,  are  unable  to  marry  be- 

[28] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

cause  of  lack  of  means  to  found  a 
f  amity." 

It  is  already  clear,  JMiss  Thomas 
believes,  that  this  transformation  of 
society,  of  which  universal  woman 
suffrage  is  only  one  small  part,  will 
give  women  equal  opportunity  in 
every  field  of  human  effort,  includ- 
ing teaching  and  research.  "Wher- 
ever women  are  already  part  of  the 
electorate  they  receive  equal  pay  for 
equal  work,  and  are  equally  eligible 
with  men  for  all  State  and  municipal 
positions.  Wherever  women  vote, 
which  will  soon  be  everywhere  in  the 
United  States  and  in  all  European 
countries,  women  will  be  elected 
equally  with  men  on  all  school  and 
university  boards.  Education  is 
women's  pecular  public  interest. 
As  an  immediate  consequence  there 

[29] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

will  be  free  competition  for  all  State- 
supported  university  professorships. 
Nor  will  marriage  any  longer  dis- 
qualify women  from  following  their 
life  work.  Women  will  not  deprive 
other  women  of  a  livelihood  or  of  a 
dearly  loved  profession  because  they 
wish  to  marry.  This  has  been  done 
in  the  past  only  because  men  do  not 
yet  understand  that  women,  like 
themselves,  find  their  greatest  happi- 
ness in  congenial  work." 
r  In  these  words  of  Miss  Thomas 
there  is  the  suggestion  that  marriage 
is  not  in  itself  a  sufficient  career  for 
able  and  educated  women,  and  that 
it  should  not  interfere  with  other 
work,  especially  of  research  and 
teaching,  to  which  such  women  have 
been  trained,  any  more  than  it  does 
with  the  work  of  trained  men. 

[30] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

If  marriage  is  long  enough  de- 
layed, there  need  be  no  considerable 
interference  with  the  outside  career 
of  the  wife.  If  there  are  to  be  no 
children,  the  woman  may  as  well  go 
along  with  the  employments  of  her 
spinsterhood  if  she  likes  them,  and  if 
she  and  her  husband  are  content  with 
a  marriage  on  those  terms.  But  if 
there  are  children,  the  mother's  out- 
side work  will  be  interrupted,  not 
onl}^  for  the  intervals  needed  to  let 
the  children  be  born,  but  also  because 
they  are  far  more  than  a  spare-hour 
occupation  after  they  are  born.  In- 
dian mothers  strap  their  newborn  pa- 
pooses on  their  shoulders,  and  go  on. 
Working  women  put  their  babies  in 
a  day  nursery  and  go  out  to  their 
work.  Mothers  who  must,  put  the 
matches  out  of  reach  and  leave  their 

[31] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

young  children  at  home  with  such 
care  or  substitutes  for  care  as  they 
can  provide,  and  go  out  to  earn 
wages.  That  is  better  than  breaking 
up  a  family,  but  is  it  an  ideal  condi- 
tion to  be  imitated  by  young  mothers 
because  they  love  their  outside  work? 

Of  course  marriage  is  a  greater  im- 
pediment to  a  woman's  outside  career 
than  it  is  to  a  man's !  Votes  for  wom- 
en cannot  change  that. 

"At  Br}^n  Mawr,"  says  Miss 
Thomas,  "we  have  never  closed  the 
engagement  of  a  woman  professor  be- 
cause of  marriage";  and  she  adds: 
"Several  j^ears  ago  I  persuaded  a. 
young  woman  scholar,  whose  husband 
was  called  to  Brj^n  Mawr,  to  take  up 
college  teaching  again.  She  told  me 
afterward  that  it  was  like  paradise 
on  earth  to  shut  herself  into  her  study 

[S2] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

in  the  college  library  among  her 
books  for  long  hours  of  intellectual 
effort." 

If  the  young- woman  scholar  had 
no  engrossing  young  domestic  dis- 
tractions and  was  bored,  of  course 
she  did  well  to  put  her  mind  on  some- 
thing that  gave  it  wholesome  employ- 
ment. JNIerel}^  to  keep  a  man  amused 
and  fed  and  his  clothes  mended  is 
not  in  itself  a  sufficient  career  for  an 
able  woman.  There  are  men  who 
must  be  carried  or  they  will  fall 
down,  and  whether  they  are  worth 
carrying  or  not  they  often  appeal 
successfully  to  the  motherliness  of 
able  women  whose  hearts  are  lonely 
and  who  shoulder  them  and  trudge 
on.  There  are  men  of  talent  and  a 
fine  spirit  geared  to  incapacity  in 
practical  affairs   (like  the  painter  in 

[33] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

Arnold  Bennett's  "Buried  Alive") 
who  are  well  worth  mothering  in  this 
fashion,  and  there  are  analogous 
cases  of  hardworking  and  able  self- 
supporting  women  who  need  the  com- 
panionship of  men  and  take  husbands 
sometimes  to  get  it,  going  on  with 
their  work  of  course.  That  is  their 
right,  and  no  one  should  gi'udge 
them  the  exercise  of  it,  and  whether 
husbands  so  acquired  can  support 
them  or  not  is  unimportant  if  only 
somehow  the  family  bills  are  paid. 

But  these  are  all  cases  outside  of 
common  experience.  Perhaps  Miss 
Thomas's  women  scholars  who  "have 
spent  half  a  lifetime  in  fitting  them- 
selves for  a  scholar's  work"  should 
also  be  classed  as  persons  to  whom 
common  experience  should  not  give 
rules.     "Half  a  lifetime"  is  thirty- 

[34] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

five  years.  Surely  women  who  wait 
as  long  as  that  to  marry  ought  to  be 
left  to  make  for  themselves  the  most 
satisfactory  terms  they  can.  No  sal- 
vage of  domestic  happiness  should 
be  grudged  them,  and  no  obstacle  put 
in  the  way  of  their  readjustment. 
They  should  hold  their  professor- 
ships, if  thc}^  need  them,  as  long  as 
thej^  can  do  their  work  and  then,  if 
they  have  qualified  for  pensions,  they 
should  have  them,  married  or  not. 

Nevertheless,  not  all  women  teach- 
ers or  professors  will  regard  as  a 
* 'horrible  alternative"  a  marriage 
acceptable  in  other  respects,  which 
diverts  them  from  teaching  and  re- 
search and  earning  salaries.  If  a 
woman  is  willing  to  marry  a  man  at 
all,  she  will  usually  be  willing  to  live 
on  his  earnings,  provided  he  can  earn 

[35] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

enough,  and  sometimes  even  when  he 
can't.  The  women  teachers  and  pro- 
fessors are  not  all  so  in  love  with 
their  work  that  married  life  without 
it  looks  "horrible"  to  them.  Some  of 
them  are  delighted  at  the  prospect  of 
being  relieved  from  wage-earning 
and  of  having  a  home,  a  husband  and 
a  famil3^  I  have  known  of  such 
cases.  Miss  Thomas  does  not  disclose 
any  knowledge  of  them.  The  fault, 
as  I  see  it,  that  is  to  be  found  with 
her  kind  of  unrest  is  that  it  over- 
values independence  for  women, 
overv^alues  the  wage-earning,  untram- 
meled  cafeer,  and  undervalues  the 
career  that  goes  with  marriage  and 
domestic  life. 

It  is  to  admire  and  respect  Miss 
Thomas  for  what  she  has  done  and 
is  doing.    For  the  rather  stupid  peo- 

[36] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

pie  who  need  to  have  it  demonstrated 
that  girls  can  learn  whatever  there 
is  in  books,  she  has  provided  one  of 
the  most  effectual  demonstrations. 
But  might  she  not  have  done  all  that 
and  run  a  nunnery  with  nuns  for 
teachers?  Is  that  what  she  would 
like  ?  She  seems  to  complain  of  mar- 
riage because  it  is  slow  to  adjust  it- 
self to  the  processes  of  Bryn  Mawr, 
but  she  is  confident  that  when  women 
vote  the  adjustment  will  be  perfected. 
Can  it  be  that  Miss  Thomas  inclines 
to  feel  that  life  is  for  study  rather 
than  study  for  life?  She  seems  to 
approve  of  marriage,  but  says  it  must 
not  interfere  with  the  careers  of 
scholars. 

When  Miss  Thomas  says  the  best 
women  are  unable  to  marry  she  must 
mean  the  best  in  scholarship.  Other- 

[37] 

45531 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

wise  it  is  a  saying  that  miist  look  for 
its  defence,  not  to  living  people  but 
to  the  might-have-been  born  that 
were  not  and  never  will  be.  It  may 
be  that  these  accomplished  ladies  will 
marry  more  generally  when  their  sal- 
aries are  larger  and  surer,  but  it  takes 
strong  faith  to  be  hopeful  of  that. 
When  wife  and  man  both  earn  wages, 
of  course  the  family  income  is  in- 
creased. Marriage  may  seem  prac- 
ticable where  both  partners  are  wage- 
earners  when  it  wouldn't  be  other- 
wise. But  what  would  it  mean  when 
wife  and  man  both  went  out  to  work 
and  had  to  hold  their  positions?  It 
would  usually  mean  childlessness 
while  it  lasted.  The  ideal  which 
seems  to  exist  in  the  back  part  of 
Miss  Thomas's  mind  of  a  coming 
marriage  where  the  wife  will  earn  her 

[38] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

own  living  and  go  her  own  gait  does 
not  seem  to  me  to  be  sound.  It  may 
do,  however,  to  temper  that  other, 
very  old-fashioned  idea  that  a  woman 
belongs  to  her  husband  and  shall  do 
as  he  says.  She  does  belong  to  him, 
certainly;  but  no  more  than  he  be- 
longs to  her.  She  should  do  as  he 
says  in  some  things;  he  should  do 
as  she  says  in  others;  both  maintain- 
ing in  many  concerns  entire  freedom 
of  individual  action.  People  get 
along  in  the  married  state  not  so 
much  by  having  separate  incomes  as 
by  finding  out  what  their  business  is 
and  minding  it.  It  is  already  appre- 
ciated by  the  intelligent  that  it  is  a 
part  of  the  business  of  the  head  man 
in  a  family  to  secure  to  all  the  women 
in  it  the  utmost  freedom  of  action 
that  is  consistent  with  family  life. 

[39] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

Women  may  get  equal  pay  for 
equal  work  whether  they  vote  or  not, 
and  notwithstanding  that  the  pay  of 
a  grown  man  is  adjusted  to  the  ex- 
pectation that  he  will  share  it  with 
a  woman;  but  one  may  doubt  if  any 
transformation  of  society  ever  will 
or  ever  can  "give  women  equal  op- 
portunity in  every  field  of  human  ef- 
fort." 

And  yet  it  may  if  "opportunity" 
is  not  meant  to  imply  capacit}'^  or  in- 
clination to  embrace  it.  Even  now 
opportunity  is  open  enough  to  wom- 
en in  many  fields  that  they  do  not 
enter  because  they  are  not  attracted 
to  them,  or  because  in  those  fields 
men  do  better.  They  might  be  presi- 
dents of  railroads  and  banks,  and 
mistresses  of  counting  rooms  and 
great  industrial  enterprises.  There  is 

[40] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

no  law  to  hinder  it.  A  good  many 
women,  as  it  is,  are  active  in  direction 
in  various  lines  of  trade,  but  they  are 
exceptional  w^omen.  The  more  valu- 
able women  do  not  turn  to  these  em- 
ployments except  under  compulsion, 
and  the  only  visible  reason  to  think 
that  they  ever  will  is  that  the  compul- 
sion seems  to  be  growing  stronger, 
and,  perhaps  because  men  fail  in 
their  duties,  more  and  more  women 
seem  to  be  pushed  out  of  domestic 
life. 

Do  we  want  to  cultivate  that  com- 
pulsion or,  if  possible,  to  lessen  it? 

Do  we  want  women  to  shoulder  an 
increased  share  of  the  hard  manual 
labor  of  the  world? 

Mrs.  Schreiner,  apparently,  would 
have  them  do  so. 

Do  we  want  them  to  do  an  in- 

[41] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

creased  share  of  the  harder  mental 
wage-earning  work,  like  managing 
railroads,  that  is  now  done  by  men? 

Miss  Thomas  apparently  would 
have  them  do  so.  Is  not  that  implied 
by  "equal  opportunity  in  every  field 
of  human  effort"? 

If  women,  with  unimpaired  power 
to  do  the  things  that  women  alone 
can  do,  could  compete  successfully 
with  men  in  the  rest  of  the  employ- 
ments, they  would  be  far  superior 
creatures  to  men. 

Once,  when  "mental  photograph" 
books  were  the  fashion,  there  was  a 
question  in  them:  "What  do  you 
most  admire  in  woman?"  The  an- 
swer to  it  that  one  man  wrote  was: 
"Milk."  Maybe  he  was  a  doctor; 
maybe  he  was  just  a  man  of  experi- 
ence in  raising  a  family.    Taken  lit- 

[42] 


THE    DISQUIET    OF    MISS    THOMAS 

erally  it  was  an  answer  with  which 
there  will  be  sympathizers,  but  taken 
broadly  it  was  full  of  philosophy  and 
appreciation  of  our  human  problems 
Women  are  the  fountain  and  the 
great  feeders  of  life.  They  nourish 
mankind,  body  and  spirit.  They  not 
only  actually  bear  and  rear  the  chil- 
dren, but  they  are  also  sustainers  of 
men.  And  some  of  the  childless 
women  have  been  the  greatest  moth- 
ers of  all. 

There  are  close  analogies  between 
body  and  spirit;  between  bodily  and 
mental  or  spiritual  functions.  There 
is  not  much  milk  in  men.  They  are 
better  for  achievement,  but  not  so 
good  for  sustenance. 


Ill 

THE    AGITATION    OF    MRS. 
BELMONT 


Ill 

THE   AGITATION   OF   MRS.   BELMONT 

MOST  men  are  conscious,  I 
suppose,  of  an  impression 
that  it  is  a  sort  of  imperti- 
nence for  a  man  to  have  opinions  of 
his  own  on  the  question  of  whether  or 
not  women  should  vote.  He  is  the 
judge  in  the  matter  and  the  jury. 
I  suppose  he  may  be  employed  with- 
out impropriety  as  advocate  on  either 
side;  but  he  is  neither  plaintiff  nor 
defendant.  Here  are  the  mothers  of 
the  land  before  him,  part  of  them  de- 
claring that  votes  belong  to  women 
and  that  it  is  his  duty  to  grant  them, 
[47] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

part  of  them  protesting  that  votes 
for  women  will  be  a  mere  embarrass- 
ment, and  not  of  use  enough  either 
to  women  or  to  the  country  to  off- 
set the  disturbance  that  will  result 
from  doubling  the  electorate.  Poor 
man !  It  is  a  Solomon's  decision  that 
is  required  of  him,  to  say  which  of 
these  two  lots  of  mothers  love  their 
country  and  humanity  the  most. 

Complaint  is  made  of  those  male 
persons  who  say  that  women  will  get 
the  vote  as  soon  as  a  majority  of  them 
want  it. 

The  suffragists  seem  to  feel  that 
such  persons  are  timorous — that  is, 
they  are  afraid  to  have  a  definite 
opinion  or  take  a  pronounced  stand 
either  way.  But  is  not  their  attitude 
fairly  seemly  for  men  sitting  as  a 
court  to  determine  what  are  the  rights 

[48] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

of  a  great  question?  Whether  they 
incline  one  way  or  the  other,  and  few 
men  are  without  leaning  in  the  mat- 
ter, their  minds  should  be  fairly  hos- 
pitable to  argument  and  open  to  con- 
viction. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  think  by  whole- 
sale of  the  anti-suffrage  men  as  per- 
sons who  grudge  to  women  their  full 
share  of  whatever  advantage  these 
progressive  times  hold  out.  No  doubt 
some  of  them  are  Bourbons  who  hold 
with  the  past  at  all  odds,  but  the 
mass  of  them  are  just  the  natural  al- 
lies of  the  anti-suffrage  women.  They 
are  not  men  opposed  to  gratifying 
women  their  desires,  but  contestants 
that  the  majority  of  women  shall 
have  what  they  still  seem  to  want: 
freedom  to  go  about  their  business 
without  having  added  to  it  any  more 

[49] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

responsibility  about  general  politics 
than  they  have  already.  The  mental 
attitude  of  men  toward  women  is  not 
determined  by  their  opinions  about 
the  expediency  of  the  suffrage. 

There  is  extraordinary  confusion 
of  argument  over  the  whole  woman 
question  and  especially  the  suf- 
frage; a  constant  offering  of 
reasons  that  are  personal  and 
particular  for  action  that  would 
be  political  and  general,  and  a 
constant  citation,  as  reasons  for  the 
suffrage,  of  facts  and  situations 
which  the  suffrage  seems  unlikely  to 
affect;  and,  as  reasons  against  the 
suffrage,  of  facts  and  situations 
which,  seen  from  a  different  angle, 
argue  for  it.  As  an  example  in  this 
latter  class  there  is  the  old  cry  about 
the  danger  of  the  "bad  woman"  vote, 

[50] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

a  cry  which  has  pretty  well  passed 
out  among  the  echoes.  I  mention  it 
to  make  good  Mrs.  Belmont's  asser- 
tion that  "men  in  speaking  of  women 
voting  always  refer  to  the  prostitute." 
The  argument  used  to  be  that  the 
prostitutes  were  allied  with  evil,  and 
would  always  vote  and  always  sell 
their  votes  to  the  wickedest  buyer. 
But  the  truth  is  that  the  very  exist- 
ence of  prostitution  inclines  some 
men  toward  woman  suffrage  because 
they  want  to  see  if  women's  votes 
could  at  all  avail  to  clean  prostitu- 
tion up.  And  as  for  the  poor  "bad 
women"  themselves,  of  course  they 
would  not  be  a  political  peril,  for,  by 
daylight  at  least,  they  are  retiring 
persons.  They  are  not  the  enemies 
of  society,  but  its  victims,  and  as  the 
most  pathetic  sufferers  by  the  present 

[51] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

order,  as  of  every  known  order  that 
has  preceded  it,  they  might  well  be 
allowed  even  now  half  a  dozen  votes 
apiece,  so  that  their  deplorable  case 
might  stand  the  better  chance  of  get- 
ting effective  attention. 

And  speaking  of  Mrs.  Belmont, 
no  doubt  she  has  political  gifts,  but 
is  she  truly  persuasive  in  exhorta- 
tion? I  don't  find  her  so.  Still  there 
are  two  branches  of  the  suffrage  dec- 
lamation. One  aims  to  persuade 
men  to  give  the  suffrage  to  women, 
the  other  to  excite  women  to  want 
votes  like  anything,  and  to  rise  up 
and  get  them  anyhow.  Miss  Addams 
is  persuasive,  but  it  seems  to  be  the 
second  branch  of  suffragist  activity 
that  engages  Mrs.  Belmont.  When 
she  speaks,  prudent  men  go  and  get 
behind    something   and   consider   in 

[52] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

which  direction  they  can  get  away- 
best.  So  probably  Mrs.  Behnont 
speaks  more  with  an  eye  to  women 
than  to  men.  I  have  been  reading  an 
address  by  her,  but  it  does  not  per- 
suade me  to  her  views.  When  she 
says  the  Constitution  should  repre- 
sent the  will  of  all  the  people,  not 
one-half,  she  forgets,  no  doubt,  that 
our  Constitution  is  acceptable  enough 
to  most  of  the  women  as  well  as  to 
the  men,  so  that  it  represents  perhaps 
three-fourths  or  seven-eighths  of  the 
will  of  the  people,  which  is  really 
pretty  good  for  a  constitution.  I 
never  heard  of  one  that  represented 
the  will  of  all  the  people,  or  even  all 
the  men.  Usually  constitutions  are 
adopted  with  difficulty  and  against 
much  opposition. 

And  when  Mrs.  Belmont  says  in 

[53] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

that  same  address  that  "a  document 
that  divides  the  people  by  the  arbi- 
trary line  of  sex  is  not  in  touch  with 
modern  growth,"  where  is  she?  That 
was  the  way  the  Creator  divided  the 
people,  and  if  He  is  not  in  touch  with 
modern  growth  it  behooves  modern 
growth  to  connect  with  Him  at  its 
early  convenience.  Until  it  does  it 
will  not  prosper. 

And  there,  or  thereabouts,  is  the 
real  hitch  in  Mrs.  Belmont's  pro- 
gram. She  thinks  that  when  wom- 
en get  the  vote  they  are  going  to  be 
different.  "As  a  whole,"  she  says, 
"women  will  some  day  emerge  from 
the  mere  physical  sex  facts  that  now 
hinder  them."  That  was  the  Wood- 
huU-Claflin  idea,  and  one  of  the  sis- 
ters wrote  a  book  elaborately  imput- 
ing a  large  share  of  the  physical  sex 

[54] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

facts  of  women  to  the  meddlesome- 
ness of  men. 

I  guess  not. 

Women  have  been  women  a  long 
time,  and  their  physical  sex  facts  are 
not  an  invention  on  which  the  patent 
seems  about  to  expire. 

Mrs.  Belmont  does  not  seem  to  see 
things  quite  as  they  are.  "When  the 
women  vote,"  she  says,  "an  entirely 
different  body  will  deal  with  the  ex- 
ecutive and  the  judiciary.  The  blind 
struggle  will  be  over;  there  will  be 
light  where  there  is  now  darkness. 
Order  will  be  brought  out  of  chaos." 

Now  is  not  that  remarkable?  The 
body  that  deals  with  the  executive 
and  the  judiciary  is  only  very  slightly 
different  when  women  vote.  Look 
about!  Look  at  the  women  and  the 
men ;  all  of  the  same  substance,  physi- 

[55] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

cal  and  mental,  with  difference  of 
sex,  to  be  sure,  but  of  precisely  the 
same  human  quality.  It's  like  dip- 
ping soup  out  of  a  tureen ;  one  ladle- 
ful:  that's  the  men's  votes;  another 
ladleful:  that's  the  women's  votes. 
And  the  main  result  is  more  soup  in 
the  plate  and  not  so  much  in  the  tu- 
reen. And  the  main  contention 
against  the  suffrage  is  that  one  ladle- 
ful of  soup  is  enough,  and  the  main 
contention  for  it  is  that  it  seems 
fairer  to  have  two,  now  that  the 
country  has  such  a  large  appetite. 

The  executive  and  the  judiciary 
have  only  a  little  to  do  with  blind 
struggle.  They  are  not  so  bad  now 
in  this  country  as  to  be  a  determining 
cause  of  chaos.  At  their  best  they 
can  no  more  than  contribute  a  little 
to  bring  order  out  of  it,  and  there 

[56] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

is  no  considerable  probability  that 
women's  votes  would  expedite  the 
improvement  of  either  of  them. 
They  might,  in  some  places,  in  some 
details.  If  Miss  Addams  had  all  the 
working  women  of  voting  age  (about 
half  the  total  number)  in  Chicago 
organized  and  ready  to  vote  as  she 
advised,  I  suppose  they  would  be  a 
power  in  Chicago  and  Illinois  politics, 
and  while  she  exercised  that  power  it 
might  do  good.  But  how  long  she 
could  hold  the  power,  and  into  what 
hands  it  would  fall  when  it  divided, 
as  it  surely  would ;  and  to  what  ends, 
wise  or  detrimental,  it  would  be  used, 
who  can  say?  Happily  the  advance- 
ment of  women  and  the  improvement 
of  the  conditions  of  life  are  not  tied 
up  to  woman  suffrage,  and  will  go  on 
as  long  as  civilization  goes  forward, 

[571 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

whether  women  vote  or  not.  Of 
course  there  is  no  more  guarantee 
that  women  will  vote  wisely  than  that 
men  will,  and,  what  is  more,  there  is 
no  more  certainty,  not  a  bit,  that  they 
will  vote  to  improve  the  condition  of 
women  than  that  men  will  do  so. 
Men  usually  do  vote  for  anything 
that  the  best  of  the  advanced  women 
want.  They  are  deliberate  about  it, 
but  they  ought  to  be.  If  women 
voted  laws  with  much  less  delibera- 
tion than  men  do,  there  would  be 
more  snarls  in  the  statute  books  for 
the  courts  to  disentangle. 

If  the  suffrage  wins  in  New  York, 
and  Mrs.  Belmont  organizes  a  "hall" 
and  goes  into  city  politics,  she  will 
have  a  lot  of  fun,  of  course,  and  it 
will  be  a  fine  field  for  her  abilities. 
But  her  dream  of  bringing  order  out 

[58] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

of  chaos  by  the  women's  vote  would 
be  subject  to  disturbance  by  the  cer- 
tainty that  for  every  woman  she 
could  enlist  for  her  policies  two  or 
three  would  get  up  early  to  take  the 
other  side.  What's  the  gain  of  hav- 
ing woman  "stand  free,"  as  Mrs.  Bel- 
mont says,  "her  chains  and  shackles 
loosened,  fallen  at  her  feet,"  if  after 
all  she  troops  off  and  votes  with  Mrs. 
Dodge?  And  that,  to  a  considerable 
and  perhaps  preponderant  extent,  is 
what  she  would  do.  It  would  be 
some  fun,  though.  Politics  don't 
make  invariably  for  righteousness, 
but  they  make  considerably  for  en- 
tertainment, and  the  argument  that 
women  are  entitled  to  their  share  of 
that,  is  better  than  most  of  the  suf- 
fragists' arguments. 

In  the   suffrage   parade  in  New 

5  [59] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

York  after  election  there  was  a  trans- 
parency that  said  that  one  hundred 
and  forty-six  girls — if  that  was  the 
number — were  killed  in  the  Triangle 
Shirt  Waist  fire,  and  that  nothing  ef- 
fectual was  done  about  it.  And  it 
asked  if  that  would  have  been  true  if 
the  killed  had  been  voters  ? 

In  so  far  as  it  was  true  at  all,  of 
course  it  would.  A  woman  killed 
makes  a  greater  impression  on  our 
public  mind  than  a  man  killed.  A 
lost  or  stolen  child  stirs  up  more  feel- 
ing than  either,  yet  a  child  has  no 
vote. 

In  the  same  amusing  line  is  Mrs. 
Belmont's  suggestion  that  though  oil 
has  risen  in  price  since  the  Oil  Trust 
was  dissolved,  cigarettes  and  tobacco 
have  not  gone  up  since  the  Tobacco 
Trust  was  dissolved,  because  the  con- 

[00] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

sumers  of  cigarettes  and  tobacco  are 
voters. 

It  was  the  famous  three  tailors  of 
Tooley  Street  who  began  their  proc- 
lamation: "We,  the  people  of  Eng- 
land." Some  of  the  suffrage  ladies, 
Mrs.  Belmont  among  them,  remind 
one  of  those  tailors  when  they  speak 
for  all  the  women  of  the  United 
States.  Nevertheless  their  voices 
are  not  raised  in  vain,  for  these  are 
revolutionary  times,  in  which  adjust- 
ment to  new  conditions  of  life  presses 
hard,  and  a  voice  is  a  voice  even 
though  its  arguments  are  vulnerable. 

The  other  morning,  in  the  lobby 
of  a  Fifth  Avenue  hotel,  two  men 
and  a  woman  were  sitting  on  a 
lounge  facing  the  office  counter.  One 
of  the  men  was  smoking,  the  woman 

[01] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

was  sewing  something  and  they  were 
all  talking  together.  You  couldn't 
say  more  for  the  men  than  that  they 
were  decent  looking.  The  woman 
seemed  a  lady.  Her  gown  was  violet 
silk,  very  nice  but  entirely  simple, 
not  a  gown  she  was  exhibiting,  but 
a  frock  in  which  she  seemed  comfort- 
able and  looked  well.  She  had  a  lot 
of  rings  on  her  hands,  and  a  clean, 
fresh  face,  but  she  was  not  a  particu- 
larly pretty  woman.  Yet  to  see  her 
there  with  her  hat  off,  sewing  in  the 
hotel  lobby  and  talking  to  her  men, 
was  a  very  pleasing  sight.  You  no- 
ticed it  because  it  was  a  little  out  of 
common.  Here,  you  thought,  was  a 
woman  who  had  a  standard  of  living 
in  her  own  head,  and  lived  it  as  she 
went  along;  who  neither  neglected 
nor  overemphasized  appearance,  who 

[G2] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

kept  her  fingers  busy  and  her  mind 
tranquil,  and  who  was  a  companion 
to  her  men.  She  domesticated  the 
whole  lobby,  so  that  you  wanted  to 
sit  down  and  rest  in  it.  You  thought 
better  of  the  hotel  because  she  was 
sitting  there,  and  better  of  the  two 
men  because  they  had  sense  enough 
to  like  her  company,  and  had  had 
sense  enough  back  in  their  lives  to 
make  her  like  theirs.  And  because 
she  seemed  to  feel  at  home  anywhere 
in  that  hotel,  and  didn't  seem  con- 
strained to  run  off  to  her  bedroom 
to  take  a  stitch,  you  set  her  down 
somehow  as  a  free  woman. 

It  is  delightful  to  see  women  free 
in  that  way,  and  at  ease  in  their 
world,  and  companionable  with  their 
men.  That's  the  way  it  is  going  to 
be,  the  suffragists  think,  after  women 

[63] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

get  the  vote.  The  vote  may  help;  I 
don't  know.  But  that's  the  way  it 
is  now  with  the  women  who  have 
found  themselves  and  their  world. 
They  are  not  waiting  for  a  vote. 
They  are  going  ahead  and  living  un- 
der the  laws  of  the  kingdom  within 
them.  One  sees  them  about  every- 
where, in  good  clothes,  in  bad  clothes, 
clean  and  not  so  clean,  rich,  well-to- 
do,  poor,  and  sometimes  very  poor. 

There  is  peace  in  their  faces.  Back 
in  their  minds  somewhere  is  some- 
thing in  which  they  find  mental  rest, 
and  by  aid  of  which  their  tasks,  how- 
ever complicated,  however  heavy,  are 
not  too  heavy  for  their  strength.  In 
a  car  of  the  Elevated  I  saw  just  such 
a  wonderful  woman,  sitting  bare- 
headed, in  poor  clothes,  between  two 
roughly  dressed  workingmen,  talk- 

[64] 


THE  AGITATION  OF  MRS.  BELMONT 

ing  earnestly  with  both,  grave,  tran- 
quil, sweet,  and  with  true  Madonna- 
like breadth  of  brow  and  simple 
sweep  of  dark  hair.  It  rested  one 
to  watch  her. 

I  look  and  look  and  look  at  the 
women  in  the  street.  [^There  are  just 
two  kinds:  those  who  have  found 
themselves  and  their  world,  and  those 
who  haven't.  These  last  are  abun- 
dantly represented  among  the  suffra- 
gists; a  masterless  lot  they  are,  out 
of  a  job  and  practicing  to  produce 
a  masterless  world.  But  the  master 
they  need  is  not  a  man,  for  some  of 
them  have  men  already,  but  an  inner 
governor,  who  shall  look  out  of  their 
eyes  and  see  truth  and  duty,  and 
strengthen  their  hands  to  seize  them. 


IV 

THE    ADMIRABLE    MISS    ADDAMS 


IV 

THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

PEOPLE  hold  views,  not  so 
much  because  of  the  facts  in 
sight,  as  because  of  the  faith 
or  lack  of  it  that  is  in  them.  The 
papers  quoted  Dr.  Forbes  Winslow 
as  saying,  in  the  Eugenics  Congress 
in  London  last  summer,  that  there 
would  be  more  lunatics  than  sane 
people  in  the  world  three  hundred 
years  from  now.  Probably  he  said 
it  with  qualifications  that  were  lost 
out  in  transit,  or  else  his  definition  of 
lunacy  is  more  comprehensive  than 
ours.     Dr.  Lombroso,  learning  that 

[69] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

madness  increases  in  this  country 
three  times  as  fast  as  population,  left 
behind  an  opinion  (so  the  newspaper 
says)  that  in  a  hundred  years  or  so 
we  would  all  have  passed  beyond  the 
help  of  mere  alcohol,  and  be  taking 
ether  or  morphia. 

But  these  learned  men  took  som- 
ber views.  We  don't  feel  so  about 
it.  We  have  faith  to  think  that,  long 
before  we  all  take  to  morphine  or 
before  half  of  us  have  gone  crazy, 
we  shall  get  the  machinery  of  life 
running  better,  so  that  the  strain  will 
be  less. 

Neither  the  suffragists  nor  the 
antis  are  at  all  favorable  to  the  sort 
of  progress  that  Dr.  Forbes  Winslow 
(as  quoted)  and  Dr.  Lombroso  have 
anticipated.  The  suffragists  feel  that 
when  women  get  the  vote  the  world's 
[701 


THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

machinerj^  will  run  smoother,  and  the 
women  opposed  feel  that  when 
women  have  to  vote  the  whirl  will  be 
worse  than  ever  and  the  current  to- 
ward the  mad-house  stronger.  But 
neither  of  them  want  the  strain  of 
living  increased. 

I  don't  see  that  either  of  these 
views  is  closely  related  to  facts.  A 
suffragette  has  been  defined  by  an 
observer,  lacking,  possibly,  in  sym- 
pathy, as  a  woman  who  wants  some- 
thing and  thinks  it's  the  vote.  That 
seems  a  fairly  sound  definition,  for 
it  is  manifest  to  observers  that  be- 
hind the  general  suffragist  desire  for 
the  vote  there  are  vastly  different 
attitudes  of  mind.  There  are  women 
who  want  the  vote  as  a  suitable  per- 
sonal attribute,  as  they  might  covet 
a  pearl  necklace,  or  house,  or  a  frock, 
[71] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

or  something  that  they  would  look 
well  in,  or  that  would  add  to  their 
personal  luster  or  distinction.  There 
are  others  who  want  it  as  an  instru- 
ment of  power.  They  want  some- 
thing either  for  themselves,  or  for 
societ}?^,  which,  they  think,  women's 
votes  will  help  them  to  get.  There 
is  Miss  Addams.  She  never  seems 
to  be  reaching  out  for  the  vote  for 
any  use  of  personal  embellishment, 
or  to  add  to  distinction  or  importance, 
which  in  her  case  would  be  hard.  She 
seems  to  want  it,  incidentally,  for 
women,  because  of  other  things  which 
she  wants  for  them  and  all  mankind, 
and  which,  she  thinks,  would  come 
sooner  if  women  had  the  suffrage. 
These  things  that  she  wants  belong 
to  honest  government  by  capable 
officers,  and  include  such  things  as 
[72] 


THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

clean  milk,  limited  hours  of  work 
especially  for  women,  restriction  of 
child  labor,  protection  from  un- 
guarded machinery  and  industrial 
diseases,  old  age  insurance,  the  diver- 
sion of  the  pay  of  convicts  from  the 
pockets  of  contractors  to  the  support 
of  the  convicts'  dependent  families, 
and  the  extirpation,  if  possible,  of 
prostitution.  Miss  Addams,  when 
she  talks  of  these  matters,  talks  of 
them  in  a  fashion,  and  with  a  breadth 
of  view  and  precision  of  instance,  that 
make  you  feel  that  whatever  Miss 
Addams  is  is  right,  and  when  she 
looms  up  as  a  suffragist,  that,  too, 
becomes  right,  by  inclusion.  Since 
Mrs.  Howe  died.  Miss  Addams  has 
become  the  strongest  argument  the 
suffragists  have. 
Why? 

[73] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

Because  her  self-effacing  person- 
ality, and  the  manner  of  her  life,  and 
her  spirit  and  her  achievements  at- 
tach people  to  her,  and  to  her  opin- 
ions. 

But  so  far  as  I  know,  which  is 
very  likely  not  far  enough,  the  chief 
basis  of  her  sentiment  as  a  suffragist 
is  that  when  women  vote  it  will  be 
easier  to  induce  the  Illinois  legisla- 
ture to  pass  suitable  statutes,  and  the 
courts  to  confirm,  and  the  administra- 
tion to  enforce,  them,  and  easier  to 
induce  Congress  to  piece  them  out 
where  necessary  with  Federal  legis- 
lation, and  easier  generally  to  com- 
pel indecent  people  to  behave  de- 
cently. 

Time  was  when  if  a  person  became 
conscious  of  sin,  he  repented.  Now 
he  tries  to  get  a  bill  through  the  legis- 
[74] 


THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

lature.  The  old  way  had  good  points, 
but  it  is  the  fashion  to  abandon  all 
the  old  retail  ways  and  go  in  for 
wholesale  methods.  That  fashion  is 
not  all  good.  Misconduct  is  bad,  but 
legislation  is  an  awful  thing.  But 
you  don't  think  so  when  Miss 
Addams  talks  about  the  need  of  en- 
forcing proper  statutes  in  Chicago. 
Beveridge's  Federal  child-labor  law 
provided  for  denial  of  transshipment 
from  State  to  State  of  commodities 
produced  in  factories  in  which  child 
labor  was  not  properly  limited  and 
guarded.  Miss  Addams  seems  to 
have  approved  that  bill  (which  to  me 
seems  scandalous ) ,  as  did  most  of  the 
social  workers.  State  rights  and  the 
fabric  of  government  seem  to  be 
nothing  to  her,  and  even  parental  and 
family  rights  seem  to  be  very  little, 
6  [75] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

so  much  she  has  seen  them  abused; 
so  much  the  duties  that  should  go 
with  them  neglected.  Her  politics 
is  clean  milk,  the  protection  of  the 
young,  conditions  of  life  that  are  not 
incompatible  with  honest  and  whole- 
some living.  But  when  it  comes  to 
connecting  these  things  with  women's 
votes,  where  is  she  ?  The  relation  be- 
tween them  is  entirely  speculative. 
"In  women  as  voters,"  says  Miss 
Addams's  fellow  -  townsman,  Mr. 
Floyd  Dell,  "we  shall  have  an  ele- 
ment impatient  of  restraint,  straining 
at  the  rules  of  procedure,  cynical  of 
excuses  for  inaction;  not  always,  by 
any  means,  on  the  side  of  progress; 
making  every  mistake  possible  to  ig- 
norance and  self-conceit."  And  yet 
he  wants  them  to  vote,  for  he  goes 
on:  "but  transforming  our  politics 
[70] 


THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

from  a  vicious  end  to  an  efficient 
means — from  a  cancer  into  an  or- 
gan." 

Why  does  he  think  that?  If  Miss 
Addams  is  a  true  representative  of 
womankind,  one  maj^  think  of  wom- 
en's votes  transforming  our  poHtics 
from  a  vicious  end  to  an  efficient 
means,  but  so  you  could  think  of 
men's  votes  doing  if  Robert  de  Forest 
or  Jacob  Riis  were  representative 
men.  Mr.  Dell  finds  Mrs.  Pank- 
hurst  much  more  representative  of 
womankind  than  Miss  Addams.  Mrs. 
Pankhurst,  he  says,  "has  enabled  us 
to  see  what  women  really  are  like, 
just  as  Miss  Addams  has,  by  her 
magnificent  anomalies,  shown  us 
what  women  are  not  like." 

But  I  guess  Mr.  Dell  generalizes 
too  much.  Mrs.  Pankhurst  looks 
[771 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

quite  as  unusual  as  Miss  Addams. 
Neither  of  them  is  representative, 
but  there  is  in  Miss  Addams  a  spirit 
that  is  more  than  hers;  that  was  not 
born  with  her,  nor  will  die  with  her, 
that  knows  neither  sex  nor  race,  nor 
depends  on  votes  or  laws,  but  works 
imperishably  and  with  great  rewards 
for  the  healing  of  the  nations.  Wom- 
en's votes  may  help  Miss  Addams's 
causes  or  they  may  not.  Her  opin- 
ion of  their  usefulness  seems  to  be  a 
matter  of  pure  faith.  But  somehow 
the  causes  have  got  to  win,  and  if 
women  don't  make  them  win,  the  men 
will  have  to. 

To  be  sure  it  is  nothing  against  an 
opinion  that  it  rests  on  faith  more 
than  on  computable  facts.  I  suppose 
that  most  of  the  great  opinions  that 
move  the  world  have  faith  for  their 
[78] 


THE  ADMIRABLE   MISS   ADDAMS 

basis.  Faith  seems  to  be  a  higher 
intelhgence  than  reason — "the  sub- 
stance of  things  hoped  for,  the  evi- 
dence of  things  unseen."  Certainly 
it  is  an  ill-furnished  soul  that  would 
not  swap  his  computable  expecta- 
tions for  his  hopes.  Anybody  that 
has  this  mysterious  confidence  in  the 
efficacy  of  women's  votes  ought  to 
want  them  as  Miss  Addams  does, 
and  strive,  and  do  battle,  and  soap- 
box for  them  as  so  many  other  ladies 
do. 

For  my  part — and  I  speak  hum- 
bly as  a  man  should,  professing  no 
more  than  inability  to  see  that  wom- 
en's votes  will  be  any  better  than 
men's — I  should  be  in  a  more  glori- 
ous state  of  expectation  of  benefits 
to  follow  the  triumph  of  the  suffrage 
if  domestic  service  was  in  a  some- 
[79] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

what  more  popular  case.  Mrs.  Ath- 
erton  is  a  suffragist,  but  less  excited 
about  it  than  some  ladies.  She  sees 
a  need  of  it  in  England,  but  as  to 
these  States  she  speaks  in  a  news- 
paper of  the  servant  question  as  far 
more  important  than  the  question 
whether  a  woman  should  vote  or  not. 
To  be  sure  the  servant  question  is 
important,  and  it  is  a  matter  almost 
entirely  controlled  by  women.  It  is 
a  great  domestic  industry  that  ma- 
chinery has  not  much  affected,  that 
increases  in  its  demands  with  the 
wealth  of  the  country,  and  that  is 
better  spread  out  over  the  country 
than  any  other  paid  occupation  that 
engages  women.  It  enormously  af- 
fects the  comfort  and  happiness  of 
life,  it  is  pretty  well  paid,  it  calls  for 
skill,  judgment,  brains  and  training, 

[80] 


THE  ADMIRABLE   MISS  ADDAMS 

and  personality  counts  in  it  very 
much  indeed.  You  hire  nimble  fin- 
gers and  a  capacity  for  consistent 
spelling  to  run  your  typewriter,  and 
nimble  fingers  and  some  other  lim- 
ited capacity  to  tend  a  loom,  but  to 
live  in  your  house  and  cook  or  wash 
or  sweep  and  make  beds,  you  hire  a 
whole  woman.  There  is  money 
enough  spent  on  domestic  service  to 
make  it  an  attractive  calling.  If  it 
were  an  attractive  calling,  it  would 
relieve  very  much  more  than  it  does 
now  the  pressure  that  drives  girls  to 
the  shops  and  factories  in  numbers 
that  cheapen  their  labor.  But  it  is 
not  sufficiently  attractive.  Girls 
don't  like  it  because  its  industrial 
standing  is  not  good;  because  it  re- 
stricts their  freedom  too  much,  is  too 
indefinite  in  its  demands,  and,  I  fear, 
[81] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

because  they  don't  like  to  work  for 
women. 

It  is  to  laugh  at  that,  but  isn't  it 
true?  I  am  told  that  domestic  serv- 
ice has  not  yet  wholly  severed  its 
connection  with  feudalism.  I  suppose 
the  average  woman  employer  of 
servants  is  strong  on  control  and 
somewhat  weak  on  liberty,  is  inclined 
to  think  of  servants  as  persons  of 
"that  class,"  and  suffers  from  some 
involuntary  inability  to  deal  with 
them  on  the  basis  of  a  common  hu- 
manity. To  be  sure  it  is  a  consider- 
able achievement  to  deal  with  all 
people  on  that  basis ;  to  perceive  that 
the  offices  of  life  have  their  various 
conventions  and  conditions  of  service, 
but  that  all  the  people  who  fill  them 
are  the  children  of  the  King.  But, 
as  it  is,  domestic  service  is  under  the 

[82] 


THE   ADMIRABLE   MISS  ADDAMS 

control  of  women,  and  if  they  had 
been  able  to  make  it  more  attractive 
I  should  have  livelier  hopes  of  what 
women's  votes  may  achieve  for 
the  conditions  of  life  outside  of  the 
house. 

Miss  Addams,  of  course,  under- 
stands all  that.  She  has  complained 
that  the  lives  of  too  many  domestic 
servants  are  dull  rounds  of  drudgery, 
she  has  said  that  domestic  service  is 
the  occupation  that  furnishes  more 
prostitutes  than  any  other,  and  she 
has  quoted  Tolstoi's  words:  "We 
constantly  think  that  there  are  cir- 
cumstances in  which  a  human  being 
can  be  treated  without  affection,  and 
there  are  no  such  circumstances." 

Two  lots  of  men  seem  to  me  to  be 
a  little  beside  the  mark  in  the  aim  of 
their   energies;    those   who   rush   to 

[83] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

trade  in  their  birth-right  as  voters  for 
the  approval  of  the  suffrage  seeking 
women,  and  those  who  exhibit  trem- 
ors of  apprehension  at  the  thought 
that  the  world  is  going  to  be  femin- 
ized. There  are  some  men  who  have 
woman-suffrage  in  the  blood;  want 
it;  always  did;  believe  in  it,  advocate 
it.  There  are  others  who  think  they 
see  it  coming  and  aspire  to  be  on  the 
reception  committee  when  it  arrives. 
The  good  suffragists  are  welcome  to 
all  the  members  of  this  latter  group. 
There  is  nothing  men  value  more 
than  women's  favor,  probably  noth- 
ing they  value  so  much,  but  their  at- 
tainment of  it  is  quite  apt  to  be  in- 
versely to  their  direct  efforts.  What 
the  best  women  like  best  in  men  is 
manhood.  It  is  not  always  to  be  had, 
and  then,   of  course,   they  have  to 

[84] 


THE   ADMIRABLE   MISS   ADDAMS 

make  the  best  of  what  semblance  of 
it  is  obtainable. 

And  as  for  the  men  who  fear 
feminism,  they  show  a  curious  dis- 
trust of  the  powers  that  are  male. 
The  only  sound  claim  the  male  crea- 
ture has  to  be  boss  of  the  universe  is 
based  on  divine  right.  If  the  Creator 
intended  that  he  should  be  boss  and 
equipped  him  with  the  facilities 
proper  to  that  office,  boss  he  will  be 
and  nothing  can  stop  him.  Votes  of 
women  will  have  no  more  effect  on 
his  mastership  than  so  many  boiled 
peas.  He  may  be  gentle,  he  may  be 
patient,  he  may  study  to  serve,  he 
may  shape  himself  to  controlled  sub- 
mission, but  if  natural  mastership  is 
in  him,  master  he  will  be.  If  it  was 
not  Nature's  gift  to  him,  and  is  not 
a  necessary  incident  of  progressive 
[851 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

human  life,  then  the  sooner  he  finds 
his  place  the  better.  Anyhow,  he 
can  do  very  little  about  it  either  way 
except  to  be  himself,  and  the  best 
man  he  can.  Petty  tyrannies  over 
women,  dogmatic  denial  to  women  of 
anything  on  earth  or  in  life  that  they 
want  and  can  attain  and  handle,  will 
avail  not  a  jot  to  keep  man  in  power. 
Women  are  very  enduring  creatures 
who  grow  strong,  and  have  distinctly 
grown  to  their  present  robust  expan- 
sion, on  petty  tyrannies  and  silly 
proscriptions.  For  centuries  in  China 
they  bound  the  women's  feet  to  keep 
women  in  their  place.  And  what  did 
it  finally  come  to?  To  Tsi-Ann,  the 
woman  autocrat!  What  the  insur- 
gent women  nowadays  are  after 
seems  to  be  not  so  much  power — for 
they  have  a  vast  deal  of  that  already 

[86] 


THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

— as  advertisement.  That  is  a  com- 
modity that  is  not  very  filling  at  the 
price,  and  is  very  apt  to  prove  in- 
compatible with  power  itself.  When 
a  car  wheel  thrashes  they  take  it  off, 
when  a  machine  goes  noisily  it  goes 
to  the  shop;  advertisement  is  noise; 
it  makes  for  jealousy,  competition, 
hostility  and  retirement.  The  ladies 
are  welcome  to  it  if  they  like  it,  but 
it  will  not  increase  their  power. 

Individual  incidents  may  have  a 
feminist  cast,  and  scare  the  timid. 
The  equalization  of  the  salaries  of 
men  and  women  in  the  public  schools 
of  New  York  has  had  the  immediate 
effect  of  a  waiting  list  of  teachers 
with  no  names  of  men  on  it.  That  is 
bad.  There  are  no  men  teachers 
waiting  at  the  bottom  of  the  line. 
But  the  schools  must  have  a  proper 
[87] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

proportion  of  men  teachers  and  some- 
how, presently,  will  get  them.  But 
another  effect  the  raising  of  the  wom- 
en's salaries  has  had  is  amusing  and 
instructive.  I  hear  that  the  enriched 
women-teachers  have  been  getting 
married  by  shoals.  I  guess  there  is 
nothing  that  women  can  get  but  what 
men  will  promptly  share.  A  woman's 
natural  use  of  what  she  has  seems  to 
be  to  confer  it  on  a  man,  and  cer- 
tainly a  man's  natural  use  of  what 
he  can  get  is  to  confer  it  on  a  woman. 
So  let  us  try  to  be  easy  in  our 
minds  and  await  whatever  is  coming 
to  women  and  men  with  fortitude 
and  due  philosophy.  "No  one  tries 
to  grind  us  down,"  Mr.  Wilson  says, 
"but  we  are  all  caught  in  a  great 
economic  system  which  is  heartless." 
And  behind  that  economic  system  is 

[88] 


THE  ADMIRABLE  MISS  ADDAMS 

Nature,  forever  seeking  her  ends  and 
vindicating  her  laws,  and  fairly  ruth- 
less in  her  proceedings.  Perhaps  we 
shall  be  able  to  inculcate  benevolence 
into  our  economic  system,  but  Na- 
ture owns  the  road  and  will  walk 
down  the  middle  of  it  till  the  crash 
of  doom,  and  run  over  anything  that 
gets  in  the  way  without  so  much  as 
saying  "Honk,  honk!" 


V 
SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 


V 

SELF-SUPPORTING  WIVES 

IT  is  quite  a  help,  in  discussing 
things  Hke  the  unrest  of  women, 
to  get  hold  of  a  fact.  A  fact 
comes  out  of  the  mist  of  theory  like 
one  of  those  red  buoys  a  steamer 
picks  up  as  it  feels  its  way  into  port 
on  a  foggy  morning.  The  biggest 
fact  about  the  modern  woman  dis- 
cussion is  the  sight  of  women  in  all 
the  shops  and  offices.  That  is  a  con- 
stant reminder  that  there  are  deep 
economic  reasons  behind  and  below 
all  the  current  disturbance.  Seeing 
all  the  army  of  office-keeping  women 

[93] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

doing  what  so  lately  was  men's  work, 
how  can  we  wonder  at  anything  any- 
body thinks  about  the  imminence  of 
an  entire  change  in  the  relation  of 
women  to  life  ?  To  the  office  men  the 
office  women  are  hands,  eyes,  ears 
and  speech,  and  of  course  brains,  too, 
in  a  measure.  Any  observer  has  a 
good  prima-facie  case  in  arguing  that 
this  enormous  supersession  of  men 
clerks  by  women  marks  the  progress 
of  a  movement  to  the  control  of  all 
business  by  women.  It  does  mean 
some  increase  of  control,  no  doubt, 
but  nowhere  are  the  words  of 
Saint  Paul,  so  much  reprobated, 
about  the  woman  being  created  for 
the  man,  better  justified  than  in  the 
shops  and  offices. 

But  it  is  a   fact  that  the  shops 
and    offices    nowadaj^s    are    full    of 

[94] 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

women  working  for  wages.  Those 
I  see  seem  happy  in  their  employ- 
ment, and  their  example  is  not  lost 
on  those  who  stay  at  home.  But 
there  have  always  heen  uses  for  un- 
married women  who  would  go  out 
to  work.  The  schools  have  long  been 
full  of  spinster  teachers,  honored  in 
their  vocation,  and  the  dwelling- 
houses  have  been  full  of  unmarried 
woman  servants.  We  have  been  used 
to  seeing  these  women  when  they 
married  give  up  their  outside  voca- 
tions. But  here  we  run  up  against 
more  facts.  One  of  them  is  the  in- 
creased cost  of  living.  Another  is 
that  the  women  who  have  gone  into 
the  shops  and  offices  have  competed 
in  the  labor  market  with  the  clerks, 
secretaries  and  salesmen,  and  the 
wages  of  the  male  workers  of  that 

[95] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

sort  have  either  fallen  off  or  have 
failed  to  increase  in  proportion  to 
the  increased  cost  of  living. 

Ellen  Key  thinks  that  men  grow 
less  and  less  able  to  support  women, 
and  so  far  as  concerns  the  general  run 
of  office-working  men  at  least,  that 
may  be  true.  But  a  woman  who  is 
a  wage-earner,  and  is  sure  of  her 
position,  will  marry  if  her  own  wages, 
or  hers  and  the  man's  combined,  are 
enough  to  provide  a  satisfactory  sup- 
port. That  is  the  case  of  the  school- 
teachers in  New  York,  who  may  hold 
their  places  whether  they  marry  or 
not. 

And  there  comes  along  another 
fact,  in  the  application,  much  dis- 
cussed in  the  newspapers  at  this  writ- 
ing, of  a  Brooklyn  school-teacher  to 
the  Board  of  Education  for  a  year's 
[961 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

leave,  without  pay,  to  give  time  for 
her  expected  baby  to  be  born  and 
started  in  life.  The  application  was 
refused  on  the  ground  that  the  Board 
did  not  have  authority  to  grant  it. 
It  has  been  usual  to  grant  leaves  of 
several  months  to  married  teachers 
in  similar  cases  where  the  reason  of 
the  application  was  not  stated,  and 
the  Board's  by-laws  permit  the  ab- 
sence of  a  teacher  for  a  year  when 
the  object  of  the  vacation  is  study. 
But  no  by-law  names  maternity  as 
an  acceptable  reason  for  a  year's  ab- 
sence, and  the  refusal  of  the  Board 
was  promptly  followed  by  the  circu-. 
lation  of  a  petition  for  a  change  in 
the  by-laws. 

That  petition  is  interesting  because 
it  aims  to  put  upon  the  city,  as  em- 
ployer, a  measure  of  responsibility 
[97] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

for  the  incidents  of  marriage  in  a 
married  woman  whom  it  employs. 
The  general  understanding  about 
marriage  has  been  that  the  husband 
should  support  his  wife,  and  that  un- 
less he  could,  or  the  woman  had  pri- 
vate means,  she  should  not  marry 
him.  This  petition  aims  to  give  the 
approval  of  a  very  important  Board 
to  the  proposition  that  a  woman  is 
justified  in  getting  married  on  the 
income  she  herself  earns,  and  to  pro- 
vide which  she  must  continue  to  be 
a  wage-earner. 

Miss  Thomas,  of  Bryn  Mawr,  in 
her  Mount  Holyoke  address  seemed 
to  approve  that  proposition,  and  pro- 
tested earnestly  against  the  idea  that 
a  woman  teacher  must  abandon  her 
profession  merely  because  she  gets 
married.     I  notice  that  Ellen  Key 

[98] 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

does  not  see  eye  to  eye  with  Miss 
Thomas  in  this  matter.  In  her  latest 
book  she  does  not  shrink  from  criti- 
cizing some  effects  of  the  influence 
of  the  woman  movement  on  marriage. 
And  while  she  knows  that  women, 
married  or  single,  must  be  supported, 
and  must  support  themselves  if  no 
one  else  supports  them,  she  is  not 
pleased  to  see  married  women  under- 
take obligations  that  should  rightly 
fall  on  their  husbands.  "No  woman," 
she  says,  "has  ever  been  at  the  same 
time  all  that  a  wife  can  be  to  her 
husband,  a  mother  to  her  children,  a 
housewife  to  her  house,  a  working- 
woman  to  her  work." 

Of  course  that  is  true.  A  great 
many  women  have  been  compelled  to 
try  to  do  all  these  things,  and  some 
of  them  have  made  wonderful  per- 

[991 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

formances,  but  to  recognize  that 
necessity  often  compels  and  misfor- 
tune constrains  is  one  thing,  and  to 
accept  as  suitable,  and  approve,  a 
plan  of  life  that  includes  continuous, 
outside  wage-earning  for  a  married 
woman  is  another. 

Of  some  marriages  Ellen  Key 
speaks,  where  man  and  wife  both 
work  at  suitable  employments,  and 
where  the  domestic  life  is  happy  and 
the  work  progresses  easily  as  long 
as  there  are  no  children.  But  "when 
children  arrive  then  there  begins  for 
the  wife,  even  in  such  marriages,  a 
life  beyond  her  strength."  To  save 
the  mother's  strength,  and  keep  it 
for  the  work  that  needs  it  most,  Ellen 
Key  would  have  "society  recompense 
the  vocation  of  mother."  That  is  a 
solution  provided  society  can  afford 

[100] 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

it,  but  the  proposal  to  have  society 
take  care  of  its  able-bodied  and  re- 
sponsible people — and  others  should 
hardlj^  be  encouraged  to  have  chil- 
dren— must  always  have  something 
of  the  flavor  of  a  proposal  that  we 
shall  lift  ourselves  up  by  the  boot- 
straps. If  society  must  have  children 
and  they  cannot  be  had  except  by 
recompensing  the  mothers,  no  doubt 
the  mothers  will  be  recompensed; 
but,  as  it  is,  society  hereabouts  schools 
the  children  and  has  assumed  so  large 
a  number  of  other  duties  that  used 
to  be  parental,  that  it  will  hesitate 
long  to  undertake  this  new  expense. 
I  am  told  that  this  plan  of  recom- 
pensing mothers  was  followed  in  the 
days  of  the  Roman  Empire,  and  for 
the  reason  that  more  children  were 
needed.      The    natural    inquiry    is: 

[101] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

"Did  it  come  when  the  Roman  civili- 
zation was  in  its  dechne?"  And  the 
answer  I  got  was  "Yes."  It  seems 
a  sort  of  provision  that  would  be 
tried  when  natural  sentiments  and 
standards  were  failing,  when,  either 
because  society  had  outrun  its  eco- 
nomic machinery  or  because  of  de- 
generacy of  morals,  men  had  lost 
their  pride  of  birth  and  scrambled 
to  get  the  satisfactions  of  life  from 
any  hand  at  any  cost.  There  may  be 
conditions  of  society  when  oppor- 
tunity has  been  monopolized,  and  law 
and  government  have  failed  to  pro- 
tect life,  when  ordinary  men,  without 
fault  of  their  own,  may  become  very 
helpless  as  wage-earners,  and  the 
market  for  labor  may  be  more  favor- 
able to  women.  There  is  no  novelty 
in  a  local  condition  where  a  woman 

[102] 


SELF-SUPPORTING   WIVES 

can  get  work  and  a  man  cannot;  no 
novelty  in  women  supporting  men 
who  cannot  get  work  or  cannot  do 
it;  no  novelty  in  women  supporting 
men  who  do  not  wish  to  work  or  who 
are  drunken  or  impractical;  no  nov- 
elty even  in  the  farming  out  of 
women  for  infamous  uses  by  in- 
famous men  who  live  on  their  tragic 
earnings. 

For  this  last  grade  of  men,  of 
whom  we  have  lately  heard  so  much, 
of  course  every  decent  person  favors 
root-and-branch  methods,  the  law, 
the  lash,  the  stock — anything  that 
will  reach  them  and  wipe  their  ac- 
tivities out  of  an  earth  that  they  de- 
file. But  it  is  mighty  hard  to  do  it, 
chiefly  because  their  women  are  usu- 
ally loth  to  destroy  the  only  men 
they  have. 

[103] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

That  is  true,  also,  of  better  and 
more  fortunate  and  abler  women. 
They  are  terribly  tolerant  and  long 
suffering  with  men ;  will  usually  stick 
to  them  when  they  seem  not  worth 
sticking  to,  and  support  them  if  they 
can  when  they  seem  not  worth  sup- 
porting. Men  seem  to  be  extremely 
necessary  to  their  happiness,  and  they 
do  not  readily  give  them  up  alto- 
gether; and  besides  a  great  many  of 
them  are  very  subject  to  the  sense  of 
duty. 

That  is  something  that  Nature  has 
arranged,  and  we  had  better  respect 
it,  and  not  dispute  that  it  is  a  valu- 
able arrangement.  But  we  need  not 
go  so  far  as  to  help  in  riveting  by 
law,  or  even  by  by-law,  on  the  so- 
ciety of  which  we  are  a  part,  provi- 
sions   looking    to    the    support    of 

[104] 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

husbands  by  married  women.  That 
will  be  done  too  much  in  ordinary 
course  without  formal  provision  for 
it. 

Some  of  the  suffragists,  or  the 
feminists — for  suffrage  hasn't  much 
to  do  with  it — have  a  vision  of  man 
and  wife  starting  out  with  dinner- 
pails  in  the  morning,  either  together 
or  separately,  and  doing  a  wage- 
earning  day's  work,  and  coming  home 
at  night,  and  raising  the  necessary 
number  of  children,  and  being  happy, 
prosperous  and  contented  in  that  lib- 
erated and  independent  condition. 
That  vision  is  nine-tenths  delusion. 
It  will  work  at  an  extreme  pinch 
where  the  alternative  is  no  bread,  and 
it  will  work  more  or  less  in  the  case 
of  childless  people.  But  for  the  gen- 
eral run  of  families  and  people  the 

[105] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

old  apportionment  is  right;  one  to 
earn  wages  and  one  to  keep  the  home. 
That  apportionment  still  governs,  I 
suppose,  in  an  enormous  proportion 
of  existing  families,  for  those  girls 
in  the  shops  and  offices  are  not  yet  all 
the  women  there  are.  And  where 
women  continue  to  earn  daily  wages 
after  marriage  the  apportionment 
will  tend  still  to  continue.  Somebody 
must  keep  the  home.  The  wife  has 
been  used  to  do  it  for  the  laboring 
husband.  But  where  the  wife  goes 
out  to  work  for  the  family  support 
she  needs  to  have  it  done  for  her. 
She  needs  some  one  to  think  for  her, 
to  sustain  her,  to  amuse  and  soothe 
and  rest  her.  She  needs  a  wife,  and 
since  she  cannot  conveniently  take  a 
wife  she  will  be  apt  to  treat  herself 
to  a  husband  to  be  a  wife  to  her. 

[106] 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

There  is  no  great  scarcity  of 
women  nowadays  who  are  hard  driv- 
en by  professional  or  business  cares 
and  labors.  They  all  need  wives;  all 
need  to  be  supplemented  by  some 
one  who  has  time  and  strength  to 
think  about  the  things  they  cannot 
spare  thought  for.  If  they  get  hus- 
bands who  do  for  them  what  women 
commonly  do  for  men — orderly, 
dutiful  husbands — they  are  lucky, 
and  nobody  should  grudge  them  the 
companionship  they  gain,  and  no  one 
should  scoff  at  the  successful  hus- 
bands of  working-women.  It  is  a 
hard  job  to  be  that.  It  calls  for  those 
saintlike  qualities  which — so  much  to 
the  displeasure  of  some  feminists — 
are  thought  to  be  characteristic  of 
women.  The  husband  of  the  wage- 
earner  must  learn  to  sink  himself  in 

8  [107] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

her,  to  be  a  helper,  an  accessory,  a 
nurse,  a  buffer,  a  keeper  of  accounts 
and  speaker  at  the  telephone.  He 
must  know  every  nerve  she  has  and 
respect  it.  He  must  know  how  she 
should  be  fed,  and  see  that  she  is  so 
fed.  It  can  be  done ;  it  has  been  done ; 
it  is  no  more  than  millions  of  women 
do  or  have  done  for  men.  Honor  a 
man  who  can  do  it  for  a  woman! 

But  there  are  few  such  men.  Some 
of  them  there  have  been,  fine  crea- 
tures ;  but  there  are  few,  though  men 
often  have  got  wonderful  discipline 
from  their  wives;  have  been  wonder- 
fully perfected  in  patience,  long  suf- 
fering, gentleness,  the  withholding  of 
inopportune  speech  and  all  the  em- 
bellishments recommended  by  Saint 
Paul  for  the  adornment  and  perfec- 
tion of  character. 

[108] 


SELF-SUPPORTING   WIVES 

And  of  course  the  boot  is  often  on 
the  other  foot,  about  as  often,  I  sup- 
pose. In  all  the  apportionment  of 
good  and  bad  in  character,  men  and 
women,  taken  by  and  large,  show 
about  alike.  Women  are  much  bet- 
ter in  some  particulars  of  virtue,  men 
in  others,  but  they  are  both  the  same 
stuff,  precisely  the  same,  and  have  no 
general  differences  of  ethical  quality. 
Sex — the  body — is  only  the  garment 
of  personality,  a  garment  strangely 
clinging  and  constraining,  but  be- 
neath it  is  the  soul,  the  same  soul  for 
man  or  woman. 

A  man  may  make  of  himself  a  fair 
substitute  for  a  wife  for  a  working- 
woman,  but  it  takes  a  rarer  talent  still 
for  him  to  make  a  competent  mother 
for  her  children.  That  calls  for  in- 
stincts he  does  not  have.    It  is  aston- 

[109] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

ishing  how  lacking  many  of  the  suf- 
fragist writers  are  in  appreciation  of 
what  is  done  for  a  family  by  a  com- 
petent mother.  They  might  have 
been  born  from  a  penny-in-the-slot 
machine  for  all  the  conception  they 
show  of  the  job  of  mothering,  and 
of  the  time,  the  thought,  the  strength, 
the  leisure  and  the  wit  it  takes  to  do 
it.  You  would  think  to  read  them 
that  a  mother's  cares  did  not  extend 
beyond  infancy,  and  that  a  fairly 
active  nurse  girl,  with  the  help  of  an 
apothecary's  clerk,  could  easily  re- 
lieve her  of  all  of  them.  But  some 
of  the  suffragist  writers  know  better 
— Ellen  Key,  for  one,  who  really  has 
a  serious-minded,  grown-up-woman's 
knowledge  about  the  woman's  end  of 
human  life,  and  comes  out  of  her 
remarkable    divagations    after    free 

[1101 


SELF-SUPPORTING    WIVES 

love  and  trial  marriage,  and  Heaven 
knows  what,  into  admirable  discourse 
about  the  domestic  side  of  life,  and 
the  enormous  importance  of  giving 
married  women  a  chance  to  keep  their 
minds  on  it. 

Altogether  too  many  of  the  active 
suffragists  present  as  their  creden- 
tials for  the  work  of  rearranging  hu- 
man life  the  glaring  evidences  of  their 
failure  to  live  it  successfully  as  it  is. 
Women  who  seem  to  have  made  a 
mess  of  all  life's  relations  are  not 
abashed  to  offer  themselves  as  pilots 
to  their  sex.  It  is  nothing  that  they 
do  not  inspire  much  confidence  in  the 
minds  of  their  more  conservative  and 
successful  sisters.  It  is  everything 
if  they  make  an  enormous  noise,  and 
that  they  do,  and  it  is  a  serious  factor 
in  disturbance. 

[Ill] 


VI 

FEMINISM   AND   THE   DUAL 
STANDARD 


VI 

FEMINISM   AND   THE  DUAL  STANDARD 

WHAT  is  a  feminist?  My 
twelve-year-old  diction- 
ary does  not  tell.  "Fem- 
inism: the  qualities  of  females"  is 
the  nearest  it  comes,  and  that  is  no 
help.  It  is  something  that  has  lately 
broken  loose,  and  we  must  consult 
the  latest  authorities.  I  find  in  the 
February  (1913)  number  of  Mc- 
Clure's  Magazine  that  "the  signifi- 
cant and  deep-rooted  movement  to 
readjust  the  social  position  of  women, 
in  its  largest  general  aspects,  is 
termed  feminism;  in  its  immediate 

[115] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

political  aspects,  suffrage."  3Ic- 
Clure's  indorses  Miss  Inez  Milhol- 
land  as  a  qualified  and  competent 
feminist,  and  Miss  Milliolland  ex- 
pounds the  faith  that  is  in  her  in  a 
piece  in  that  magazine.  So  perhaps 
if  we  look  into  the  piece  we  shall  get 
a  notion  of  what  the  feminists  have 
got  on  their  minds. 

Miss  INIilholland  discusses  "the 
liberation  of  a  sex."  Women,  for  the 
first  time  in  history,  she  says,  are  to 
have  something  approaching  an  equal 
voice  in  the  administration  of  human 
affairs.  "They  are  to  sit  on  juries, 
to  administer  public  offices,  to  confer 
in  the  high  councils  of  the  nation," 
and  "bring  directly  to  the  problems 
of  government  and  of  civilization 
those  qualities,  in  certain  respects 
different  from  man's,  which  they  have 

[116] 


FEMINISM  AND  DUAL  STANDARD 

hitherto  been  permitted  to  employ 
only  indirectly,  in  the  private  influ- 
ence of  the  individual  woman  on  the 
man  who  has  acted  for  himself  and 
her  in  the  world  of  government  and 
affairs." 

Please  do  not  smile:  this  is  a  seri- 
ous matter.  There  are  a  good  many 
women  and  they  have  various  minds 
and  opinions,  and  it  is  probable  that 
Miss  Milliolland  does  not  represent 
all  of  them.  But  some  of  them  prob- 
ably she  does  represent  more  or  less, 
and  it  may  be  instructive  to  search 
out  what  details  of  liberation  she  and 
they  consider  desirable. 

Forecasting  the  results  which  may 
be  expected  to  attend  "this  sudden 
liberation  of  an  entire  sex"  from  "the 
conditions  of  bondage  and  restraint," 
Miss  Milholland  finds  that  "the  insti- 
[117] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

tutions  most  certain  to  be  touched 
and  changed  are  the  institutions  in 
which  the  sex,  as  a  sex,  is  most  pecu- 
liarly and  vitally  interested  —  the 
home  and  marriage  itself."  She  does 
not  say  explicitly  in  this  first  article 
how  they  are  to  be  changed,  but  she 
gives  notice  that  "the  old  reticences 
are  destroyed  forever,"  and  she  wants 
us  to  study  what  women  are  printing 
and  saying  "in  the  light  of  the  under- 
Ijdng  body  of  modern  thought  from 
which  they  are  clearly  drawing  their 
ideas  and  their  inspiration."  So  do- 
ing, she  says,  we  shall  arrive  at 
certain  rather  obvious  conclusions, 
including,  it  seems,  "an  assault  on  the 
dual  standard  of  morality,  and  an 
assertion  of  sex  rights  on  the  part 
of  woman."  To  illustrate,  she  quotes 
from  a  current  play  in  which  a  girl 

riisi 


FEMINISM  AND  DUAL  STANDARD 

"has  slipped  away  for  a  week-end 
with  the  son  of  her  father's  em- 
ployer." The  fact  is  discovered.  The 
boy  is  persuaded  to  marry  her  "to 
save  her  honor."  She  refuses.  She 
does  not  love  him.  "But  you  did 
love  me,"  he  insists.  "You  must  have 
loved  me."  She  turns  and  asks,  "Did 
you  love  me?"  "No,"  he  replies, 
"but  I'm  a  man.  It  was  just  my 
fancy  of  the  moment."  "Well,"  is 
her  answer,  "I  am  a  woman.  It  was 
just  my  fancy  of  the  moment." 

All  right,  Miss  INIilholland,  all 
right.  One  is  no  better  than  the 
other,  and  that  is  recognized  in  the 
proposal  that  they  marry.  They 
don't!  Very  well.  But  if  there  is  a 
baby,  what  becomes  of  the  baby,  and 
what  becomes  of  the  girl?  The  dual 
standard,  which  cannot  be  admired 

[119] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

ethically,  is  based  on  the  very  practi- 
cal consideration  that  it  is  the  girl, 
not  the  man,  who  has  the  baby.  It 
has  come  to  be,  not  for  the  indulgence 
of  men,  but  for  the  protection  of 
girls.  The  great  practical  inconve- 
nience of  having  babies  in  the  world 
without  fathers,  and  mothers  without 
husbands,  has  led  to  the  dual  stand- 
ard and  to  an  extreme  reprehension 
of  the  indiscretions  of  women.  That 
reprehension  is  a  good  deal  mollified 
in  these  times,  not  as  a  consequence 
of  the  "liberation  of  a  sex,"  but  be- 
cause sentiment  in  these  matters  has 
grown  kinder  and  more  just.  You 
may  well  enough  argue  that  the  girl 
in  "Hindle  Wakes"  did  better  not  to 
marry  the  boy  if  she  did  not  want 
him,  especially  if  there  was  no 
baby.    But  you  cannot  argue  for  a 

[120] 


FEMINISM  AND  DUAL  STANDARD 

liberation  of  sex  that  eliminates  the 
dual  standard  bj^  bringing  the  chas- 
tity of  women  down  to  the  level  of  the 
chastity  of  men.  N  That  seems  to  be^ 
what  you  argue  for  and  predict,  and 
that  won't  wash.  It  implies  condi- 
tions that  would  add  to  the  burdens 
already  incurred  in  behalf  of  "unfor- 
tunate" women,  additional  cares  for 
the  rescue  of  "unfortunate"  men. 
Chastity  in  bachelors  and  chastity  in 
spinsters  have  different  values,  a 
difference  based  on  the  fact  that 
when  there  is  a  baby  it  is  the  woman 
that  must  bear  it.  You  may  argue 
that  the  chastity  of  men  must  be 
prodded  up  to  the  level  of  the  chas- 
tity of  women,  and  in  that  you  will 
have  the  support  of  the  morahsts, 
though  the  urgency  of  passion  is 
thought  to  be  far  less  in  normal  wom- 

[121] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

en  than  in  normal  men.  But  you 
will  get  no  support  anywhere  for 
social  recognition  of  the  kind  of  "sex 
rights"  that  you  seem  to  demand  for 
liberated  women.  If  that  is  femin- 
ism, "in  its  immediate  political  as- 
pects, suffrage,"  verily  the  fat  is  in 
the  fire. 

-  And  do  you  mark.  Miss  Milhol- 
land,  that  the  dual  standard  is  almost 
entirely  a  matter  of  social  sentiment! 
The  law,  or  the  police  power,  to  be 
sure,  is  harder  on  prostitutes  than  on 
their  patrons,  but  that  accords  with 
a  theory  that  prostitutes,  like  gam- 
bling house  keepers,  are  promoters  of 
disorder.  Except  for  women  rated 
as  "disorderly,"  there  is  no  law  con- 
cerning chastity  that  does  not  equally 
apply  to  men,  and  for  married  peo- 
ple the  written  law  is  the  same  for 

[122] 


FEMINISM  AND  DUAL  STANDARD 

man  and  wife,  and  public  sentiment 
sustains  it. 

And  who  are  the  upholders  and 
motioners  of  the  dual  standard? 
Women  chiefly,  Miss  Milholland.  It 
is  strongly,  vehemently,  the  feeling  of 
mothers  that  the  exercise  of  what  you 
call  "sex  rights"  is  not  a  privilege  to 
be  desired  for  daughters,  and  they 
discourage  it,  especially  in  women, 
wherever  it  appears,  i  I  don't  see  how 
the  "readjustment  of  the  social  posi- 
tion of  women"  is  going  to  change 
the  feelings  of  mothers  on  this  point, 
or  that  it  will  make  a  difference  if 
women  "sit  on  juries,  administer  pub- 
lic offices  and  confer  in  the  high  coun- 
cils of  the  nation."  The  exercise  of 
"sex  rights,"  except  the  right  to  get 
married,  does  not  seem  likely  to  re- 
ceive either  political  or  social  support, 

d  [123] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

but  rather  to  remain,  as  now,  dis- 
tinctly an  individual  adventure,  as  to 
which  the  destruction  of  the  old  re- 
ticences will  be  earnestly  deprecated 
by  the  adventurer.  The  combination 
of  the  miscellaneous  exercise  of  "sex 
rights"  with  advertisement  is  some- 
thing that  very  few  civilized  women 
have  been  able  to  get  away  with. 
Some  remarkable  women  have  done 
it- — Cleopatra,  Catherine  of  Russia, 
George  Sand,  and  others — but  their 
success,  though  interesting,  is  hardly 
attractive,  and  the  failures  that  offset 
it  are  to  be  reckoned  in  millions. 


VII 
THE  CAUSE  AND  THE  CURE 


VII 

THE  CAUSE  AND  THE  CURE 

AFTER  all,  disturbance  is  a 
fine  thing.  First  or  last, 
pretty  much  all  the  consider- 
able good  we  see  about  has  come 
along  of  it.  Flies  ever  the  spume 
from  the  great  waves  that  great 
winds  have  raised.  The  ocean  with- 
out occasional  gales  would  be  dull 
and  probably  unwholesome,  and  hu- 
man life  without  occasional  disturb- 
ances would  get  nowhere.  The^ 
current  unrest  of  women  is  a  big 
disturbance,  but  every  storm  blows 
out  in  time,  and  so  will  this  one.'  / 
[127] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

But  how  will  it  end  and  where  will 
it  leave  us  ? 

In  thinking  about  that,  one  asks 
what  has  caused  it.  It  seems  credible 
enough  that  it  is  part  of  a  general 
disturbance  that  is  epidemic  all  over 
the  world;  a  disturbance  caused  by 
the  uneasiness  of  great  masses  of 
people  who  find  themselves  cramped 
by  the  limitations,  or  overstrained  by 
the  demands,  of  the  existing  appara- 
tus for  the  regulation  of  human  life, 
or  in  whom  the  aspirations  of  an 
intelligence  quickened  by  popular 
education  demand  opportunities  and 
satisfactions  that  they  see  but  cannot 
share.  In  art,  in  medicine,  in  busi- 
ness, in  politics,  there  is  the  same  in- 
surgent disposition,  shared  by  thou- 
sands, to  smash  the  existing  machine 
which   denies   them   expression   and 

[128] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

make  a  new  one  that  will  do  better. 
Humanity  seems  to  have  outgrown 
its  old  collar  and  to  insist  on  having 
one  of  the  next  larger  size.  Every 
considerable  historical  event  in  the 
last  fifteen  j^ears  is  a  part  of  that 
movement.  The  lesson  of  "room, 
brothers,  room  in  the  world"  was 
taught  to  Russia  by  Japan,  was 
taught  by  the  United  States  to  Spain, 
was  taught  by  Boers  to  British  and 
b}^  British  to  Boers,  is  proceeding  in 
China,  is  proceeding  strenuously  in 
England,  is  being  taught  to  all  Eu- 
rope by  the  Balkan  allies,  is  going 
forward  obscurely  and  dolorously  in 
Mexico,  was  lately  exhibited  some- 
what himiorously  in  the  Futurist 
picture-show  in  New  York,  is  dem- 
onstrated in  medicine  by  the  Osteo- 
paths and  Christian  Scientists,  and 

[129] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

in  law  by  movements  for  recall  of 
judges  or  their  decisions,  and  in  the 
Roman  Catholic  church  by  modern- 
ists, and  separation  of  church  from 
state  in  Italj%  France  and  Spain. 
And  of  all  this  general  ruction  the 
woman  movement  is  a  part.  It  may 
be  right  or  wrong  in  directing  so 
much  energy  toward  the  attainment 
of  woman  suffrage,  the  arguments  of 
its  individual  apostles  may  be  often 
bad  and  their  specific  aims  mistaken, 
but  there  is  no  use  of  disparaging 
the  power  of  the  movement,  or  of 
denying  that  it  has  great  underlying 
causes,  or  of  doubting  that  it  will 
have  an  effect  on  human  life. 

I  suppose  the  underlying  causes 
of  it  are  chiefly  economic.  The  rest- 
less women  would  not  get  so  much 
leadership  unless  considerable  masses 

[130] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

of  women  were  disturbed,  and  the 
considerable  masses  would  not  be 
disturbed  nor  follow  restless,  and 
often  mistaken,  leaders  if  they  were 
comfortable.  Everj^bod}^  nowadays 
nibbles  at  education ;  ever j^body  reads 
and  either  has  ideas  or  goes  through 
motions  of  having  them,  and  conse- 
quently everybody — pretty  much — 
has  more  than  formerly  to  express, 
and  feels  more  need  of  expressing  it. 
Now  the  natural  way  for  women  to 
express  themselves  seems  to  be  by 
means  of  husbands  and  children,  but 
somehow  a  proportion  of  the  women, 
already  large  and  constantlj^  increas- 
ing, seem  to  find  that  mode  of 
expression  either  impossible,  or  so 
difficult,  or  so  unsatisfactory,  that 
they  turn  to  anj^thing  else  they  can.j 
A  large   proportion  of  the  women 

[131] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

nowadays  do  not  seem  to  look  upon 
marriage  as  their  natural  destiny. 
They  plan  for  it,  but  merely  as  a 
possibility,  considerably  speculative, 
and  with  alternatives  that  look  surer 
at  least,  and  are  more  definitely  at- 
tainable by  their  own  efforts.  fThe 
alternatives — the  office  jobs  and  fac- 
tory and  shop  employments,  and 
nearly  all  the  independent  vocations 
— are  all  right  enough  except  for  one 
thing,  that  the  women  who  take  to 
them  permanentl}^  might  almost  as 
well  not  be  women  at  all,  because 
they  cannot  conveniently  combine 
with  the  service  these  occupations 
exact  the  great  and  indispensable 
service  of  continuing  the  species.]  It 
was  for  that  indispensable  service  that 
women  were  contrived,  and  not  for 
office  work,  nor  factory  work,  nor 

[132] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

work  in  shops.  To  the  indispensable 
service  the  great  mass  of  women  un- 
doubtedly are  true,  preferring  it  and 
undertaking  it  when  it  is  reasonably 
attainable. 

Then  what's  the  matter  ? 

Machinery  for  one  thing,  which,  as 
we  are  so  much  told,  has  upset  the 
old  domestic  industries,  disturbed  the 
conditions  of  life  and  multiplied  the 
employments  that  are  alternatives  to 
marriage.  For  another  thing,  and 
partly  as  a  result  of  machinery,  an 
overwhelming  and  compelling  indus- 
trialism, engrossed  in  material  prog- 
ress, and  ruthlessly  beset  to  turn  the 
most  precious  assets  of  humanity  and 
civilization  into  material  wealth  for 
immediate  use.  The  same  industrial- 
ism that  deforests  the  land,  skins'  the 
soil,  devours  and  wastes  the  coal-beds 

[1331 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

and  the  iron  mines,  and  squeezes  the 
last  drop  of  mineral  oil  out  of  the 
bowels  of  Earth,  seems  ready,  with- 
out any  further  compunction  than  a 
column  of  figures  may  signify,  to 
divert  the  brains  and  hearts  and  fin- 
gers and  bodies  of  women  from  the 
service  indispensable  to  life  to  these 
temporary,  sterile,  and  incomparably 
less  important  uses  of  commercialism. 
Somehow,  in  a  world  never  so  rich 
as  now,  the  men  seem  less  able  than 
they  used  to  be  to  take  care  of  the 
women.  Everything  tends  to  be 
commercialized,  all  the  commerciali- 
zation tends  to  monopoly,  and 
monopoly  makes  a  machine  and  the 
human  race  must  tend  it  or  starve. 

That  is  one  thing  that  machinery 
has  done  for  us.  It  is  nobody's  fault 
in  particular.     It  has  just  come  to 

[134] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

be  because  conditions  produced  it, 
and  because  wealth  is  good,  and  be- 
cause if  you  invent  and  make  and 
run  machines  and  organizations  at 
all,  you've  got  to  do  it  at  a  profit. 
The  machinery  of  contemporary  life 
is  wonderful,  admirable,  marvelously 
convenient  and  productive.  The 
trouble  is  that  the  human  race  seem 
to  be  caught  in  the  cogs  of  it,  and  to 
be  in  danger  of  being  ground  up. 

So  the  women  cry  out.  Something 
is  the  matter  and  they  feel  it.  Driven 
partly  out  of  their  own  kingdom  in 
man's,  they  demand  equal  rights, 
privileges,  emoluments,  in  the  man's 
kingdom.  That  is  the  old  cure  by  a 
hair  of  the  dog.  It  is  not  much  of 
a  cure.  The  better  way  is  to  make 
the  woman's  own  kingdom  habitable 
again,  and  to  get  all  the  modern  im- 

[135] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

provements  into  it,  and  win  her  back 
to  live  in  it  and  rule  it,  or  at  least 
check  her  exodus. 

/    Are  the  suffragists  willing  to  do 
that? 

Not  at  all.  They  are  working  to 
share  the  man's  kingdom.  If  the 
woman's  kingdom  is  to  be  restored 
and  glorified  the  men  must  do  it,  and 
it  must  be  done  by  politics  and  by  re- 
ligion. 

By  politics? 

To  be  sure!  The  suffragists  aim 
to  improve  the  condition  of  women 
by  politics,  and  think  that  women's 
votes  would  help  vastly  in  doing  so. 
It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  they 
would,  but.  whether  there  are  to  be 
women's  votes  or  not,  the  improve- 
ment of  the  conditions  of  life,  and 
with  them  the  condition  of  women, 

[136] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

is  the  immediate  aim  and  effort  of 
contemporary  politics  everywhere. 
One  reads  in  President  Wilson's  in- 
augural address: 

"We  have  been  proud  of  our  in- 
dustrial achievements,  but  we  have 
not  hitherto  stopped  thoughtfully 
enough  to  count  the  human  cost,  the 
cost  of  lives  snuffed  out,  of  energies 
overtaxed  and  broken,  the  fearful 
physical  and  spiritual  cost  to  the  men 
and  women  and  children  upon  whom 
the  dead  weight  and  burden  of  it  all 
have  fallen  pitilessly  the  years 
through." 

It  is  to  lighten  and  diffuse  that 
dead  weight  and  burden  that  that 
speaker  and  his  supporters  are  dedi- 
cated. Success  in  that,  if  they 
achieve  it,  will  mean  political  success 
and  continuance  in  power;  failure  in 

[137] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

that  will  mean  a  failure  in  politics, 
and  the  transfer  of  power  to  other 
hands  that  must  make  this  same  re- 
lief the  chief  good  that  they  practice 
to  obtain.  We  have  passed  through 
a  stage  of  national  development  when 
the  chief  good  has  seemed  to  the 
ablest  minds  to  be  the  development 
of  business,  of  transportation,  of 
manufactures;  the  production  of 
commodities,  the  construction  of  an 
enormous  apparatus  of  civilization. 
Business  has  thriven;  the  railroads 
have  been  built,  the  apparatus  has 
been  constructed  and  commodities  in 
unprecedented  volume  have  been  pro- 
duced. Comes  along  now  all  this 
disquiet  and  unrest,  spreading  and 
increasing  until  it  has  come  to  be 
more  important  than  gains  for  the 
gainful,  or  commodities  for  all  hands ; 

[138] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

until  indeed  it  has  become  the  subject 
that  most  engages  statesmen's  minds. 
The  provision  of  bread  and  of  bath 
tubs  was  never  so  great,  but  the  peo- 
ple are  not  fed  to  their  satisfaction, 
and  cannot  wash  away  their  aches. 
They  are  not  satisfied.  There  never 
was  so  efficient  an  apparatus  of  life. 
No  one  with  any  sense  wants  to  make 
it  less  efficient  or  check  its  steady 
growth  to  meet  increasing  needs  and 
cultivated  wants.  But  now  attention 
has  been  drawn  away  from  apparatus 
to  people.  The  chief  problem  is  no 
longer  "How  can  we  get  more  ma- 
chinery?" but  how  can  the  spirits  of 
men  be  fed? — how  can  life  be  made 
sufficiently  satisfying  to  the  mass  of 
the  people  to  induce  them  to  sustain 
the  government? 

It  isn't  at  all  a  case  of  women 

10  [139] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

alone.  It  was  not  women's  votes 
that  turned  the  old  Republican  party- 
out,  or  started  the  hammering  of  the 
trusts,  the  revision  of  the  tariff  and 
all  the  incidents  of  the  new  politics. 
It  was  a  general  revolt  against  a 
politico  -  industrial  apparatus  that 
seemed  to  have  grown  oppressive. 
There  is  a  great  problem  to  be  solved 
in  politics,  but  it  is  not  disproportion- 
ately a  woman-problem,  and  it  will 
not  be  solved,  disproportionately,  by 
women.  *  The  woman  problem  is  a 
part,  and  especialh^  a  symptom,  of  it. 
The  woman's  influence  and  thought 
will  greatly  affect  the  solution  of  it 
as  they  do  of  every  human  problem. 
But  it  has  got  to  be  worked  out  by 
the  ablest  political  minds  our  country 
can  produce,  working  continuously 
on  it,  and  the  ablest  and  least  dis- 

riioi 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

traded  minds  for  such  matters  are 
still  the  minds  of  the  ablest  men.  ) 

The  disquiet  of  the  women  cannot 
be  allayed  separately  by  anything 
done  for  women.  It  is  part  of  the 
general  disturbance  and  can  only  be 
soothed  by  measures  that  will  also 
pacify  the  rest  of  societ5^  It  should 
have  many  good  effects.  The  driv- 
ing of  so  many  women  out  into  the 
industrial  world  cannot,  must  not, 
fail  of  valuable  results  in  training,  in 
development,  in  demonstrated  capac- 
ity for  many  new  undertakings  and 
employments.  At  least  this  great 
adventure  of  woman  into  the  man's 
kingdom  is  giving  to  the  world  a  new 
appreciation  of  her  value,  both  in 
those  activities  into  which  she  has 
been  constrained  to  intrude,  and  in 
that  domain  from  which,  in  so  alarm- 

[141] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

ing  a  measure,  she  has  been  evicted. 
Women  are  freer  and  more  powerful 
and  doubtless  happier  as  civilization 
progresses,  as  justice  grows  more 
kind  and  reasonable  and  intelligent 
and  even,  and  force  and  brute 
strength  count  for  less  in  the  transac- 
tions of  life.  The  interest  of  women 
is  all  for  the  development  and  per- 
fection of  civilization  and  the  purifi- 
cation of  politics.  We  have  lots  of 
votes  now,  amply  enough  to  express 
every  form  of  discontent.  The  need 
is  not  of  more  votes  but  of  more  dis- 
passionate intelligence;  not  of  more 
votes,  but  of  knowing  what  to  vote 
for. 

But  politics  will  never  do  the 
whole  business  of  pacifying  human 
life  and  making  people  content  to 
live  it.    It  never  did :  it  will  not  now. 

[142] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

The  great  agent  in  that  is  religion. 
The  great  asset  of  our  civilization, 
incomparably  more  important  than 
all  our  astonishing  apparatus  for 
promoting  physical  comfort,  is  the 
mind  of  Christ.  That  mind  pene- 
trated all  the  perplexities  of  human 
relations  and  solved  the  problem  of 
life  in  all  its  phases.  It  is  on  the 
spirit  of  Christ,  working  through  in- 
dividuals, and  shaping  and  inspiring 
our  politics,  that  we  must  count  to 
straighten  out  the  tangles  in  our  af- 
fairs. That  is  the  only  force  that  is 
equal  to  so  huge  a  task ;  that,  working 
perpetually  to  bring  justice,  sanity 
and  love  into  human  concerns,  can 
make  men  wise  enough  to  be  men 
and  women  patient  enough  to  be 
women.  That  is  the  only  force  that 
can  make  labor  dulj^  tolerant  of  capi- 

[143] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

tal  and  capital  duly  considerate  of 
labor;  that  can  keep  the  spiritual  in 
control  of  the  material,  and  yet  leave 
apparatus  free  to  accumulate,  and 
wealth  to  increase,  and  beauty  to  de- 
velop, and  can  bring  liberty  and  op- 
portunity to  all  creatures  to  work 
out  all  there  is  in  them  that  is  good. 
And,  since  in  our  day  the  spirit  of 
Christ  is  the  great  fountain  of  justice 
and  libertj^  it  would  be  an  imperti- 
nence for  anj^one  to  declare  that  it 
is  opposed  to  votes  for  women.  It 
is  enough  to  say  that  it  is  patient, 
continuous  and  irresistible  like  the 
forces  of  nature,  among  which,  to  be 
sure,  it  must  be  reckoned.  If  the 
vote  as  a  token  of  direct  participation 
in  politics  is  something  of  which 
woman  has  been  unjustly  deprived, 
then  in  the  larger  development  and 

[144] 


THE    CAUSE    AND    THE    CURE 

ampler  liberty  that  are  coming  to  her 
she  will  get  it.  But  if  it  is  something 
that  belongs  to  the  man's  part  in  life, 
an  overrated  power,  offset  by  powers 
inalienably  conferred  upon  her,  then 
the  demand  for  votes  for  women  is 
a  mistake,  and  in  the  long  run  will 
not  prevail. 

Either  way  it  is  not  so  big  an  item 
as  it  seems.  The  equality  of  women, 
does  not  depend  upon  it,  but  rests  on 
facts  and  functions  that  are  just  as 
operative  where  no  one  has  a  vote 
as  where  suffrage  is  universal.  There 
is  no  woman's  party;  there  is  no 
man's  party.  All  the  women,  suf- 
fragists and  anti-suffragists,  who  are 
any  worth  to  any  cause  are  for  man, 
and  all  the  men  who  are  worth  any- 
thing to  anybody  are  for  woman, 
and  there  is  nothing  in  life  that  is 

[145] 


THE    UNREST    OF    WOMEN 

more  their  business,  or  that  more  en- 
gages the  attention  of  the  best  of 
them,  than  to  see  that  she  gets  her 
dues, — all  of  them;  all  the  liberty, 
opportunity,  education  and  power 
that  should  be  hers. 

But  however  men  may  try  to  ac- 
complish that,  the  resuft  will  always 
be  imperfect,  no  matter  what  women 
may  achieve.  The  assignment  of  be- 
longings is  very  inexact  in  this  world, 
and  satisfaction  is  rare  except  as 
spiritual  acquisition  offsets  material 
defect.  That  is  where  religion  comes 
in,  teaching  and  inspiring  and  con- 
soling, lifting  minds  out  of  despair 
at  faults  and  shortcomings  of  men, 
and  bringing  them  the  fortitude  and 
confidence  that  come  from  faith  in  a 
great  plan  of  a  Creator. 

(3) 


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